Bulls and broncos are separated, cordoned off into their designated holding corrals next to an empty arena. A rider walks over to one of the fences and climbs up two rungs to peer at what the night will have in store for him.
It’s May 31 and the rodeo doesn’t start for three more hours, but before the fans show up, the rodeo company has to get itself tied up and ready.
Cowboys push more bulls into the pens where the animals get revved up and ready to be ridden. Like a pack of dogs, the animals struggle for dominance and place, occasionally pushing against the fences with enough force to frighten the horses haltered, tied, and waiting on the other side.
Next to these 1,000- to 2,000-pound animals that have the potential to drop any cowboy worth his boots to the dirt sits the Justin Boots Sports Medicine trailer. And it’s not just for pre-event taping, massaging, and ice. Justin Boots Sports Medicine Program Director Rick Foster is at the ready to be the first on the scene should the awful happen while the adrenaline is pumping, in both the animal and the rider.
“This is an eight-second sport,” Foster said. “We want to get him out of there.”
The trailer is close enough to the arena that the trainers inside can get to an injured cowboy quickly. A stretcher waits within arm’s reach of the arena gate; there’s a video feed hooked up to the televisions inside, so Foster can see a replay of how any injury happened; and Foster’s traveled with the rodeo company enough to know the professional athletes who depend on him.
“These guys aren’t just going to run and quit [because they get hurt],” Foster said. “We just what to make sure they can get out there and ride [again], do what they need to do.”
For the most part, he treats the same injuries most trainers do: sprains, strains, and contusions. He said the biggest difference at the rodeo is that the opponent is a “1,200 pound horse.” Riders get their legs hung up in stirrups, get stepped on by animals, get hit by a bull horn, or take rips on the arm. And, as with any professional sports injury that doesn’t have time to heal, it needs a little pre-action attention.
Foster said most of the professional riders show up about an hour before their event to get fixed up, but on May 31, as he pulled up to his trailer almost three hours before the rodeo, he already had his first customer: stock contractor Tony Amaral.
Although Amaral isn’t a rider, he works with the animals and gets them fed, moved to the right spot, and ready for each rodeo. In between rodeos, he tweaked his knee when he stepped in a gopher hole at his home a couple of days before coming to Santa Maria.
“It wasn’t bad, and then I rode, gathered bulls, and the son of a gun was not good,” Amaral said.
Foster spent more time with Amaral than an orthopedist does to check out an ACL tear. But that’s normal, because Foster knows his potential patients on a first-name basis.
“I’m kind of like the team trainer,” Foster said. “These guys that have been rodeo-ing hard, I’ve been able to confide and talk to them, help them, and know them well.”
The rodeo company Foster travels with moves a group of professional rodeo-ers and animals to rodeos around the country. Before Santa Maria, they were in Redding. Next up for the company is a rodeo in Reno, Nev. Justin Boots Sports Medicine has two other trailers also following professional rodeo circuits. Together, eight trainers make the rounds to 125 rodeos each year.
Foster said Justin Boots puts an estimated $1 million into its rodeo sports medicine program each year, and pulls in another $1 million in volunteers and expedited and comped services.
Without the ability to have volunteer trainers and coordinate with local sports medicine facilities to get staff to the rodeos, Foster said the company would only be able to make it to 35 to 40 rodeos each year.
As director of the program, Foster oversees all three trailers and coordinates the effort for the trailer he staffs. He makes sure local doctors, trainers, and therapists are on call during the rodeo, gets the ambulances to the event center, and rounds up volunteers.
Although he hasn’t always been a sports medicine program director, the pre-rodeo get-ready is something Foster’s been doing all his life, and since he showed up for work in 1986 at a rodeo in Clovis, he’s been a trainer with Justin Boots Sports Medicine.
“I competed in rodeo through college,” he said. “Luckily, with sports medicine, I got to work with the rodeo professionals I didn’t get to be.”
Contact Staff Writer Camillia Lanham at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 6-13, 2013.