Many students walk into a different world when they head home from school. Very few, if any, step into Steinbrenner Senior Jamie Haney’s lifestyle. He is a regular student until 12 o’clock every school day, and then he goes home and the real work begins. He spends most of the rest of each school day and almost all his weekends either honing his rodeo skills or working with cattle at Neil Mathis’s ranch.
Jamie is an amateur tie-down roper, bulldogger and team roper and travels all around the country during the summer for competitions. He won the Florida state tie-down roping competition his sophomore year, with a time of 8.4 seconds, and is aspiring to go to Nationals and obtain a college rodeo program’s attention.
Jamie loves the adrenaline rush his lifestyle brings; he also bears the permanent scars of his craft, which have come mostly from his bulldogging competitions. The bulldogging event requires a rider to ‘leave the box’ riding his horse at full gallop, maneuver his horse next to a young steer who is running full speed, slide off his horse as he leans onto the calf, all while trying to grab and tilt the calf’s horns and use the calf’s momentum to flip it to the ground. Once this is done, the rider must tie any three of the calf’s four legs together and put his hands in the air. The rider’s time is tallied and he is ranked based on how quickly he was able to finish
Bulldogging is just one of the many components of Jamie’s cowboy lifestyle that keeps him away from home. As Jamie said, most weekends “I’ll come home from school on Friday, and I’ll go to Dade City, hookup my rig, and I’ll be gone until Sunday night. “ Then when 7:25 Monday morning rolls around, Jamie is just another student walking down the hall to his class.
Adler Shannon // Web Sports Editor
