The 34th annual Sundre Pro Rodeo will still go on, however, it will be without a midway.
“When we had to change the dates, we were hoping we'd get everybody to come back onside, but it looks like we're going to lose our midway,” said Scott Smith, president of the Sundre Rodeo & Race Association. “Which is too bad, because I know it brings a lot of families,” he said.
“We had a feeling that there might be some casualties as a result of pushing the weekend back and unfortunately one of them was the midway.”
The midway contractor that was committed to the June rodeo has another commitment for this weekend. The rodeo, which annually runs in June, was postponed until this weekend, as a result of overland flooding in June.
“We had a tough time finding another midway contractor,” he said. “There's only a handful of them and they're running around all over Western Canada to different fairs, rodeos and events and when there's so few, they get committed so early.”
On a positive note, close to all of the other stakeholders are on board for this weekend.
“We are fortunate for the most part we got all of our stock contractors back. All of our key contractors as far as our announcer and co-announcer and sound people and concession people,” he said.
Other events included with the rodeo this weekend will be the Sundre & District Chamber of Commerce annual parade, as well as Sobeys' free pancake breakfast. There will be a fireworks show Friday at dusk and the cabaret will be on Saturday evening. BS bingo is a go for Friday evening and Sundre resident Jina McDougall will be inducted into the Canadian Rodeo Hall of Fame during the Sunday performance.
“It's a nice honour that she has selected Sundre as the rodeo where she feels that she wants to receive the induction,” he said. “When you've got good additional events going on, besides the rodeo, it brings people to town. Hopefully people will get into the spirit and come out and participate and get to the rodeo grounds and see a performance or two.”
He said the committee had spent all of its budgeted promotional funds leading up to the June rodeo, so it hasn't been able to afford promoting the change of date to the same extent.
“Where we're going to suffer, is all the money that we had spent for our promotion for June, there's very little that we can do about recouping that,” he explained. “We ran a lot of print ads, we ran a lot of radio ads. All that money that we had allocated for the June rodeo has been spent.”
Another downfall of the change in date is that the Sundre pro rodeo will be competing with the Lethbridge pro rodeo over the course of the weekend.
“We picked the best weekend that we could and we didn't want to go head to head with another big rodeo,” he said. “We're optimistic that a lot of the American cowboys and a lot of the good Canadian cowboys and cowgirls will be able to pick up the Lethbridge rodeo and then come to Sundre for the Sundre rodeo.”
Typically in June, the competitors start at the High River pro rodeo, head to Sundre's pro rodeo and then to Wainwright's pro rodeo, he said.
“They (competitors) like to cluster the rodeos. If they're on the road they like to make sure there's some decent rodeos to get to and a lot of them will try and get to two or three in one weekend,” he explained.
The committee is also losing a few volunteers, as they have other commitments during the weekend.
“We're going to lose a few volunteers because of family holidays, but we're hoping that we'll have other people step up. It takes a lot of volunteer hours to put it on and to run it,” he said.
He believes that the support from Sundre's residents will make or break the event.
“Sundre has been excellent in terms of throwing their support behind the rodeo and I guess we're really counting on that to happen,” he said.
The decision to postpone the rodeo was a “tough decision to make”, but it was the “right decision to make”, he said.
“We remain optimistic and we are going to give it our best shot to have the best rodeo possible.”
He said the committee's members are excited and looking forward to the weekend.
“It was kind of deflating after we built up to produce the rodeo in June and then to have it all washed away, it was hard,” he said. “But I think everybody's excited and getting pumped up for it and we're really optimistic it's going to be a great rodeo.”
The weekend offers a total of four rodeo performances that include bareback riding, steer wrestling, team roping, saddle bronc riding, tie down roping, barrel racing and bull riding.
The performances also include novice saddle bronc, novice bareback, junior steer riding and mutton bustin' for children.
