SPURRING ON GOOD GRADES

By ANDREW MCGINN a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Tex ain’t havin’ it anymore.

“Colton has decided anything is free game for roping,” mom Amy Crouse explained recently.

“If Harry has a rope in his hand,” dad Nick Crouse warned, “you better watch out.”

Just to be clear: Colton and Harry are one and the same. To Mom, Grandma and teachers, the Greene County seventh grader is Colton. To Dad and a growing number of rodeo cowboys, he’s Harry, a middle name intended to honor the great-grandfather who established the family farm just outside Dana.

But there’s only one Tex: the Crouse family’s mini Aussie dog.

The little shepherd has been lassoed so many times that he now just automatically goes into hiding when Colton “Harry” Crouse starts swinging a rope.

Nick Crouse, too, was once tripped up by Harry’s rope. But only once, Nick is quick to note.

This is what life is like when your son is a budding professional rodeo cowboy at only 13.

Harry’s talent with a rope was on full display one recent morning in the front yard of the family’s 170th Street homestead as he threw one after the other from afar at a dummy steer, nearly every one of them landing with a satisfying thwap precisely around the plastic horns not totally unlike the thwip of Spider-Man’s web shooters.

Now, just envision the skill needed to do the same astride a galloping horse — usually a gelding named Hoss, in Harry’s case — as a 500-pound steer makes a crazed dash for freedom.

If Harry were to take up competitive roping and riding any faster, he would have had to come out of the womb wearing chaps.

“It’s been enough that he’s been kind of hard on our taxes,” Amy Crouse confessed, referring to her son’s winning ways.

Nick Crouse says his son has a natural sense of how animals move. He can, his dad says, read cattle.

“You’ve either got it or you don’t,” observed Nick Crouse, 40, a Greene County native who has between 400 and 500 head of cattle and 15,000 hogs, not to mention horses. “He’s got it.”

What Harry’s also got is a growing selection of oversized, decorative belt buckles to wear to school — the cowboy equivalent of bling that signifies his success at rodeo events in Wyoming, Texas, Oklahoma and elsewhere.

He picked up his most recent in late June for making the National Junior High Finals Rodeo in Des Moines in team roping.

This part of summer — peak rodeo season — you’re apt to find 13-year-old Harry roping against adults at rodeos sanctioned by the 45-year-old Iowa Rodeo Cowboys Association (IRCA), either as a two-man roping team with his dad or as the heeler to another guy’s header.

“It’s not often a 35-year-old guy calls a 13-year-old kid and asks him to heel for him,” Nick Crouse said, still somewhat flabbergasted. “That’s quite a deal.”

In team roping, two riders — a header and a heeler — are required to chase down a steer that comes barreling out of the chute. True to their names, the header throws the first rope over the animal’s head or horns, then the heeler lets the second rope fly, timing the throw just right to catch both hind legs when they’re in the air. In the PRCA, catching only one leg results in a five-second penalty.

The clock stops when both ropes become taut and the two horses are facing the steer. The Crouses like to aim for a time of seven seconds. Unfortunately, Nick Crouse said, pro cowboys have been known to sneak into amateur rodeos on occasion and pull it off in four.

This time of year is spent on the road, going from rodeo to rodeo. In July alone, Nick Crouse said, there were 31 IRCA rodeos from which to choose. It’s not uncommon for them to hit six in a single weekend.

“Sometimes you throw the horses in the trailer saddled,” he said.

For Harry, rodeoing is something that not only sets him apart from the other kids at Greene County Middle School, but is also time well spent with his dad.

“We basically sleep in the truck and eat Pringles and beef sticks,” Harry explained, undoubtedly describing a middle schooler’s dream lifestyle.

But when school starts up again in August, the incoming eighth grader will tackle his studies like a cowboy wrestling a steer.

“This year I ended up with As and Bs,” Harry said with an air of pride. “I finally got my crap together.”

A lack of motivation

Not that long ago, there wasn’t a single horse to be found at Crouse Farm Inc.

Harry was struggling in school — mainly because if he was there, he wasn’t on the farm.

“We could not get him motivated for anything,” Amy Crouse recalled. “He didn’t want to work in school. He wanted to be on the farm.”

Nothing, it seemed, could get their second-grade son to pay attention in school. Taking away tractor rides left him unfazed. TV privileges and toys were lost, to no effect whatsoever.

But the one thing Harry wanted, and didn’t have, was a horse.

“He needed something to light a fire under him,” Nick Crouse said.

Enter a trail horse named Playboy, picked up by Nick at auction, and a plan devised by Carly Tiffany-Brown, his then-teacher at Greene County Elementary.

If Harry had a good day at school, Mrs. Brown would message Amy that it had been a green day, enabling him to ride the horse. A red day meant he couldn’t so much as visit the barn.

“That really bothered him,” Amy Crouse said.

Lo and behold, it worked.

“From then,” she said, “he started applying himself in school. That horse was everything to him.”

Before long, the whole family — which includes brother Brayton, 16 — had horses and took up sorting, in which numbered cattle are herded into a pen numerically, as a family activity.

Amy Crouse, for one, was new to the Western way of life, having grown up within the Gowrie town limits with teachers for parents.

Admittedly, as late as 2018, she hardly knew a thing about rodeos when she took Harry to compete in his first — a junior high rodeo in Moville — where he participated in breakaway roping and chute dogging, an event related to steer wrestling.

“I didn’t realize there were rules,” she recalled with a laugh.

For his part, Nick Crouse was a little more accustomed to a Western lifestyle, having tried his hand at riding roughstock as soon as he was old enough not to need his mom’s signature.

Even still, Nick recalls the time he was “smoked by a bull” up in Dayton during a night of practice that left him with a shattered face and $30,000 in medical bills.

That’s the reason the Crouses won’t let Harry ride roughstock at his age — but as any parent can attest, they seem to go from 13 to 18 in roughly eight seconds, too.

Until then, Harry has to be content with collecting buckles, ribbons, trophies and prize money from events that aren’t likely to put him on a stretcher, like team penning, in which teams of two or three horses and riders get a limited amount of time to move and pen specific cows from a herd. Harry was on teams that placed third in 2018 and took the reserve spot in 2020 at the American Quarter Horse Youth Association (AQHYA) World Championship Show in Oklahoma City.

But where he shines brightest is team roping, either roping with or against cowboys who often have 30 years of experience under their belts.

“He swings the rope good enough and rides good enough for his age that he has as much potential as anyone in the country,” Nick Crouse said.

Actually, it’s hoped the activity that made Harry a better student in the first place will eventually end up paying his way through college. Schools at all levels, including nearby Iowa Central Community College, have rodeo teams and offer scholarships.

From there, who knows. The Wrangler National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas is the ultimate goal for every professional rodeo cowboy, and it’s his goal as well.

“Only time will tell,” Harry said with the kind of sly smile that should have sent Tex running for cover.

Poor dog.