By Sara Hinds
“Nod your head. Crack the latch. Horse jumps out. The timer starts. You ride for eight seconds, and there's a whistle that blows, and the ride's over.”
In the amount of time it took for you to read Garrett Shadbolt’s description of how bareback riding works, he’s been bucked from his horse.
It happens. A lot. Luckily at this point in the Doane alum’s rodeo career, he only rides in competitions, so the bucking is kept to a minimum, but the number still reaches about 100 head per year across 85 competitions.
Shadbolt is entering his seventh year competing as a professional bareback rider, a career he’s pursued after graduating from Doane University in January 2019.
The concept of willingly getting on an animal trained to throw you around makes perfect sense to the Merriman, Nebraska, native.
“I've grown up riding my whole life,” Shadbolt said. “You do everything horseback out here, so the bond between rider and horses is very much alive.”
After catching the rodeo bug in high school, he competed throughout high school and over the summers during college at the amateur level.
But when Shadbolt came to Doane in 2014, he came to wrestle. The men’s wrestling program had just rebooted the year prior after a pause since the 1970s.
As he improved on the mat, he improved on the horse. Heading into his senior year, he wanted to make the jump from amateur to professional rodeo. Doane didn’t have an official rodeo program, so Shadbolt got permission from the college president to represent Doane as a team of one in the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association. He finished as reserve champion in 2018.
Shadbolt, who believes in a philosophy of biting off more than one can chew and that we’re built to do more than we think we can, also majored in chemistry at Doane. Thursdays consisted of six hours of lab time amidst fasting to make weight for Friday wrestling duals.
And while rodeo and ranching consumes his life right now, he said he wouldn’t have achieved the success he’s had without his athletic and academic experiences at Doane.
“Right now, my professional [rodeo] career is paying all my bills, and I owe that to wrestling almost 100%,” Shadbolt said. “The mental condition and the physical condition that four years of wrestling at that level put me through prepared me for this career. [...] However, I really cherish my chemistry degree. I just really like learning, and now I know how to learn. I know how to learn and teach myself anything. So I really, really enjoy having that and being able to use it. I know I'm not in the chemistry field anymore, but having the ability to learn and the ability to teach yourself is a life skill.”
As of March 2026, he’s ranked 15th in the world for bareback riding in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. His seventh-place finish for the 2025 National Finals Rodeo regular season was “the best one I’ve had so far.”
Bareback riding, like life, is part luck. Shadbolt’s success hinges on the horse he’s dealt. Two judges watch the eight-second ride. They give the horse and Shadbolt scores on a scale of 1-25, for an aggregate total of 100.
Horses at larger rodeos, say the National Finals Rodeo, have been vetted extensively and come recommended by contestants. It’s an honor if your horse is selected to compete.
At competitions, riders get to spend time with the horse before they’re riled up.
“But when they crack the latch it’s bad to have expectations of what that horse is gonna do,” Shadbolt said. “At this point, I've been on so many [horses] I can kind of get a feel for what I'm dealing with, whether it's something obvious, like, ‘Oh, this is a young, scared colt that hasn't been out that much and is pretty nervous about this,’ or, ‘Oh, this is an old campaigner that's standing here like a statue and could care less about what I'm going to do.’”
Those eight seconds Shadbolt is on the horse is somewhere between a blur and slow motion.
“I can see a lot of what goes on in the ride and usually kind of tell you what happened afterwards,” Shadbolt said. “It is absolutely controlling chaos.”
Which could describe his life off the horse, too. Shadbolt and his wife, Katie, are parents to four kids. While he talked about balancing college rodeo with college wrestling, his daughter wanted to show her dad her new creation.
“Look daddy! I made my own [a word that exists only to four-year-old Mavis].”
“Looks like a crazy bug, Mavis,” Shadbolt said before describing the at-home food-craft project, “they’re sticking grapes together with toothpicks.”
Shadbolt is in the second half of his riding career. Bucking horses and bareback riders can have 10-year careers, Shadbolt said. Fewer bucks are in his future, but ranching and raising four kids will maintain other kinds of chaos. Whatever’s in store for Shadbolt, he’s more than prepared.
“Nod your head. Crack the latch. Horse jumps out. The timer starts….”
