Mesalands crowns champion, co-champion

Mesalands Community College crowned one outright champion and saw another athlete earn a co-champion title during the finals Saturday night of its Grand Champion Region intercollegiate rodeo at the Quay County Fairgrounds rodeo arena.

Mesalands bareback bronc rider Cooper Filipek, who hails from Rapid City, South Dakota, secured his title with a 77 score Saturday - the best of the night - after a successful ride on Mohawk. His cumulative score of 151 points over two days earned him a championship buckle.

Mesalands goat-tying contestant Shea Grogan of Fort Collins, Colorado, earned co-champion honors with New Mexico State University's Lyndsey Orris. Both tied with cumulative times of 16.3 seconds over two nights of the competition.

In the bull-riding competition, Mesalands' Marco Juarez of Anthony, New Mexico, earned robust cheers from the grandstand crowd when he scored an 86-point ride Saturday on Cajun Roux. Combined with a 73-point ride Friday, that briefly put him in first place in the standings.

But Brad Moreno of Central Arizona College snatched the championship buckle with an 87-point ride minutes later and a cumulative points total of 164.

In team roping, Holland Roukema and Denton Faver of Mesalands finished second overall with a cumulative time of 15.4 seconds over the two nights and briefly took the lead with a 7.4-second effort on Saturday. Cash Burnside and Clay Elkington of Central Arizona won the title with a cumulative time of 12.9 seconds.

The annual rodeo in Tucumcari, which took a break in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, also featured athletes from Cochise College, Navajo Tech and the University of Arizona.

Mesalands coach Matt Hughes expressed mixed emotions about his team's performance over the weekend.

"As a team, points-wise, we had a lot of missed opportunities," he said. "It wasn't our best rodeo; we had a good rodeo. But we did have a lot of people who stepped up and did good who hadn't done good. There was a lot of good in there and a little bit of bad."

Before Saturday's finals, the rodeo paid tribute to Mesalands volunteer assistant coach Carlos Ortiz of Tucumcari, who died on Sept. 29 at age 62. Ortiz not only offered Hughes a place to live for a while right after he was hired as Mesalands' head rodeo coach, but he also proved to be a mentor and adviser for many of the program's athletes.

In a solemn ceremony, cowboys turned loose a steer tied with the final loop that Ortiz had made. His granddaughter, Kaylee Foote, led a riderless horse, signifying Ortiz's absence, into the arena ring shortly before the competition began.

"He'll surely be missed, and definitely missed in this arena, for sure," Hughes said after the rodeo. "He was a big help to us, and I certainly learned a lot from him. I can carry that on, and that's cool."