Friday Features: UWA’s Bullock & Taylor compete in two sports they love
By Mike Perrin
Blair Bullock and Catherine (Cat) Taylor work hard to get ready for basketball season at the University of West Alabama. The young women put in long hours running sprints, shooting countless layups, doing strenuous weight-lifting work and 3-point shooting drills. It’s a tough grind, but at least they don’t have to shovel up afterwards.
It’s not like that in their other intercollegiate sport at UWA – rodeo. Both Bullock, a sophomore sports management major, and Taylor, a senior in exercise science planning to head to physical therapy school, have many more responsibilities when rodeo is in season. They have to care for their horses, morning and night.
“My day pretty much starts off by getting up and heading to the barn before class to feed, hay and make sure they have water,” said Taylor of her two rodeo horses at school, Rose and Jinx. “Then, once class and basketball – if we have it that day – are over it’s pretty much back at the barn to ride both of them and then feed, hay and water again before heading home to do homework and feed myself.
“One plus to being a barrel racer is there is no set time for practice. The girls who do breakaway [roping], for example, may have practice at 6 p.m. because that is when the calves are in the pen, but with barrels they can pretty much be set up any time, so there is no set time I have to be there to ride.”
Bullock is a breakaway rider from McAlpin, Fla. – a good one who ranks first in the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association’s Ozark Region after the fall portion of the two-term season. She also had two horses in Livingston for the fall. “I live on a farm called the Triple B and I have many horses back home,” she said. “Last year I brought three to school, but this semester I just have Bay and Cadillac. Taking care of those horses is a lot of work, from filling water buckets or troughs, to putting food and hay out twice a day, cleaning out the stalls daily, getting their hooves trimmed and shod, to constantly having to fix and check fences. They also have to be groomed.”
Luckily, rodeo season and basketball practice overlap only a week or two, so the women don’t have to worry about finding someone to care for their horses while they are on road trips. When fall rodeo is over, the horses head back to their home bases until spring season approaches.
Bullock’s horses – along with Paint, Pocahontas, Woodrow and many others – have been good to her even before her rodeo career began at 10-years-old. “My dad is a first-generation cowboy and my mom was six months pregnant while barrel racing with me in the womb. You could say I was literally born to ride,” she said.
Taylor, an Arrinton, Tenn., native, said she starting riding when she was about 5 years old. “I was about 7 when I started competing in junior rodeos. I didn’t do high-school rodeo, but I was still able to attend some rodeos outside of basketball season, but during basketball that was all I was focused on because at that point, I knew basketball was my ticket to college.
“I played a lot of summer basketball,” she said, “where I competed in multiple ‘exposure’ tournaments, which is where different colleges attend to recruit. One tournament I was playing in was in Atlanta. I was entered in a rodeo in Tennessee, too, which was a four-hour drive. Mom and I drove to Atlanta on Friday morning where I played a basketball game. We drove back to Tennessee that night for rodeo and then drove back to Atlanta after the rodeo to be able to wake up and play two basketball games on Saturday!”
Both Taylor and Bullock said the ability to stick with both sports is a big reason they are at UWA. Taylor transferred from Tennessee Tech as a junior. “I was definitely recruited to play basketball,” she said, “but when the basketball coach, Coach [Rusty] Cram, found out that I did rodeo, too, he said that it would be possible for me to be able to do both. Luckily basketball and rodeo season don’t really conflict. I have to miss some conditioning for basketball, but that is only for about two weeks. Rodeo season begins and when it ends basketball season begins. Basketball season ends, rodeo season begins again.”
Bullock said her dream of playing Division I basketball eventually took a back seat to her love of combining hoops and rodeo. “As a kid my dream was to play Division I basketball. I was given that opportunity, but weighing my options, I decided I couldn’t be without a horse for four years,” she said. “I started looking more at Division II and NAIA schools. I had about four full-ride offers to do dual sports, but after visiting with the coaches and a few players I decided that West Alabama was going to be my choice.
“Both coaches [Cram and rodeo head coach Alex Caudle] said they were all for me trying to do dual sports and would help me out as long as I did my job and went all out for them.
“I can’t really choose between basketball and rodeo,” Bullock said. “Even though they are completely different, they give me the same rewarding feeling.”
So far, Bullock has played in two games for the 4-6 Tigers and sports a 1.5-points-per-game average while Taylor has started five of six and is second on the team, scoring an even 11 points per outing. The 5-foot-10 Taylor’s 5.7 rebounds per game is also second on the squad.
While rodeo is not an NCAA-sanctioned sport, West Alabama has fielded a team since the mid-1990s. Still, some students are surprised when they happen upon the practice arena.
“Honestly, a lot of students just think I play basketball until they come to our home rodeo,” Taylor said. “Then I get a lot of questions the next day in class about doing basketball and rodeo. A lot of rodeos aren’t really close to school, but we do host our own home rodeo once a year and a lot of the students attend.”
Bullock said she does get questions from a lot of students about rodeo, but, “a lot of people, to my surprise, don’t even know the school has a rodeo team. A lot of our rodeos are about five hours away or more, but when we have our one rodeo at West Alabama a lot of students come.”
Follow Perrin on Twitter, @mikeperrin27. Email comments to: mikeperrin27@gmail.com.
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