North grad ropes in scholarship

John Harte / The Californian Luke Garrett practices roping at his home. John Harte / The Californian Luke Garrett's rodeo talents have landed him a college scholarship.

Filed: June 9, 2001

By AMY BROCKETT
Californian staff writer
e-mail: abrockett@bakersfield.com

North High graduate Luke Garrett is headed to a small west Texas college on a scholarship.

Not unlike those won by deserving students across the nation, Garrett's scholarship includes tuition, money for schoolbooks, and room and board.

It does provide one unusual perk: three stalls.

That's right, stalls. The kind you'd find in a stable. Those have been tossed into the deal because part of Garrett's ticket to a free education happens to be his horses -- horses he rode to the National High School Finals Rodeo for two years in a row. In a little more than a week, 18-year-old Garrett will make his third run for the nationals when he competes in the California High School Rodeo Association state finals in Quincy.

While his friends marvel that the university would offer to house Garrett and his horses, Garrett seems to think the stalls are a rather unremarkable element of his scholarship package.

"It's just part of the deal, you know what I mean?" he said Wednesday from the dusty rodeo arena behind his east Bakersfield home where he practiced team roping with a friend. "Like a kid has a locker for his cleats and his baseball bat. Well, I need these things for my sport."

It's a sport Garrett has been in love with since he was a little boy. He doesn't come from a rodeo family, so he didn't catch his first glimpse of a rodeo until neighbors invited him to watch a competition when he was just 8 years old.

"Then on the first little rodeo he ever went to, they were riding little calves," said his dad, Randy Garrett, who added with a laugh, "And when he won his first little belt buckle, it was all downhill from there."

This fall, Luke Garrett and the three horses he uses for calf roping, team roping and steer wrestling will compete with the rodeo team at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas.

Alpine is a west Texas town of about 6,000 people that sits less than 100 miles from the Mexican border.

Garrett has never even visited Alpine, much less seen the campus of Sul Ross. But he's certainly heard about it -- Sul Ross is the birthplace of the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association.

"I've always said I wanted to go to Texas," said Garrett, who said he plans to study ag business at the college. "My parents wanted me to stay in California for a few years first, but then this happened. All I know is, there's lots of good team ropers in the (National Finals Rodeo) and they all come from Texas."

While Garrett doesn't know the exact amount of his scholarship -- details will arrive within days in the form of a letter -- he knows it's a sizeable amount.

But it's just a small part of what Kern County students as a whole earn in scholarship money every year.

Kern students have earned around $10 million in scholarship awards per year for two of the past three years, said John Teves of the Kern High School District. That figure does not include the 2000-2001 school year.

But housing for horses is a new one for Teves.

"I didn't even know they gave scholarships to rodeo participants," he said.

"I've never heard of anything so unique as a couple of stalls thrown in."