By SAMI McGUIRE, Staff Reporter
She fiddles with the worn leather strap on her saddle as she sits anxiously atop her horse.
Her blue eyes are intense with determination. Behind them, millions of thoughts are racing through her mind, the announcer calls out her name, and the thoughts fade away. She picks up her reins and rides down the alley and pushes her horse into the arena to run barrels.
This arena is just at a college rodeo, but one day she dreams of racing in an arena in Las Vegas, and receiving the prestigious title of a world champion barrel racer. This girl is Catherine Goris.
Goris is an active member of the Northwestern Oklahoma State University rodeo team. She is from Cottiville, Missouri, which is a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. She is a fifth year senior at Northwestern majoring in agriculture, and minoring in business. “I chose this major because it was something that I’ve always been interested in, but didn’t know much about,” Goris said.
Agriculture has been one of Goris’s interests for as long as she can remember. She first was introduced to agriculture by her dad, Steve Goris. He owns a hunting property that he plants crops on, which is where the interest stemmed from.
At age 14, Goris’s love for horses first started when she watched the movie “Flicka”. Since then Goris started begging her dad for a horse, and by age 15 she started riding lessons. Her dreams came true at age 16 when she got her very own black mare, which resembled Flicka from the movie.
Goris named the young black mare “Miley,” and started training her. Goris didn’t start with rodeo though. She started with hunter jumper. She rode hunter jumper and trained Miley to be a hunter jumper horse. That was until she started to gain interest in barrel racing when she met some other barrel racers that boarded their horses at where she boarded her horse.
That is what drove Goris to come to college to rodeo. After going to a college close to home for two years at St. Charles Community College, she wanted to do something that her family never dreamed of doing.
Goris broke the family mold first by starting to ride horses, and then she broke more of the mold when she decided to come to Oklahoma to pursue rodeoing. “I’d consider my family to be city people,” she said. “I’ve always been the most ‘country’ in my family, and sometimes it made me feel like the black sheep.”
Goris said she simply Googled rodeo schools in Oklahoma. Several colleges with rodeo teams came up, and she and her dad visited colleges throughout Oklahoma.
Northwestern was the college Goris chose. Now she said she couldn’t have imagined going anywhere else. “I like Northwestern,” she said, “it is affordable and has a good rodeo team. I enjoy my teachers and friends that I’ve made here.”
Now Goris is an involved member of the rodeo team. Not only does she rodeo for the team, but also works as a student coach. As a student coach, she organizes breakaway roping practice, takes care of the rodeo team’s Facebook page, helps with advertisements, organizing the Northwestern rodeo coming up in October and helps with other events the rodeo team attends.
Goris has worked extremely hard to try and compensate for her late start in the rodeo world. Some obstacles she said she had to overcome is starting late, not growing up in a rodeo family and finding a horse that she gets along with.
Besides those obstacles, Goris has some medical conditions that she has had to overcome, and learn to deal with. She is a twin, and was born three months premature at only 2.6 pounds. This caused her to get scoliosis and chiari malformation. Scoliosis is the curving of the spine and it causes intense muscle spasms. Chiari malformation is when brain tissue extends into the spinal cord and this causes severe headaches.
“Getting into rodeo has been hard because of these problems,” Goris said, “but rodeo has made me a more determined individual and helped me through a lot.”
Goris said that rodeo has pushed her to grow as a person. When Goris graduates in May 2017, she plans to pursue her dream of rodeo even further. She said she hopes to start training with professional barrel racers, and learning the ropes of professional rodeo. After she learns all that she can, and finds the right horse, she hopes to start professional barrel racing herself.
“Coming to Northwestern to rodeo was probably the craziest thing I’ve ever done,” Goris said. “I had no clue what I was doing, but I’ve made great connections and learned a lot. I think coming here was the best choice I’ve ever made, and now I can’t wait to take what I’ve learned and start pursuing my crazy dreams.”