Alan Kim | The Roanoke Times

PULASKI -- Kelly Beahm caught the bug the first time he set foot in a rodeo venue.

He had no training, but at age 8, he said he knew he wanted to be a cowboy.

"It gets in your blood and you keep wanting it," said Beahm, now a high school senior.

His family raised horses in Draper and his parents were involved with the rodeo, so it made sense he and his brother would participate one day.

The first rodeo "didn't go very well, but we learned a lot from it," Beahm said. "There's a lot of responsibility in it. You've got your horse you've got to take care of, you've got to take care of everything and keep yourself healthy,"

This weekend, Beahm and others will test their riding and roping skills in a multistate competition at the New River Valley Fairgrounds in Dublin. The rodeo starts at 6:30 Saturday evening, with a second round at 2 p.m Sunday.

It's the sixth event this season, and two more are set before the state finals next spring. Four statewide winners in each of 11 events will be chosen there, and they will be sent to a national championship next summer.

The Western tradition of rodeo, with events such as calf roping, bull riding and barrel racing, has filtered across the nation the past 50 years. In 1949, the nonprofit National High School Rodeo Association started, and now leagues are in at least 41 states, with more than 12,500 students involved from middle and high schools.

About 100 students are in the Virginia association, which started in 1995. About 50 percent of those students are in Southwest Virginia, said Fred Wilcox, national director of the Virginia High School Rodeo Association.

Wilcox said the economy has hurt participation the past few years, and participants are dropping.

The league is not associated with any school. Members must pay $160 in annual dues, on top of the $30 to $65 fees to enter events, the cost of travel to events and the cost for the care of animals. In 2007, the National High School Rodeo Association brought in $353,000 in membership fees, according to its 2007 tax filings.

The goal of the sport is to teach participants responsibility while preserving Western heritage and having fun, organizers say. Members usually have a rural background, an interest in agriculture or a love of animals.

"They're living the life of a cowboy and a cowgirl. They love the glamour of it all," Wilcox said. "It's addicting. It is so different. A rodeo is more like a circus than it is a horse show."

Although schools have rodeo clubs, like the one at Pulaski County High, the schools don't pay for any of the equipment or events. But Wilcox doesn't want to be governed by a school system and said the sport is different from most secondary sports.

"It's not unusual for someone to have a child participating in high school sports, and the family to have no involvement whatsoever," he said. "They go to football practice right after school and the bus takes them to the game on Friday." With rodeo, "it takes a team of people to support."

Beahm's family backs his love of the sport and is willing to do whatever it takes to help him succeed.

Until this year, Beahm attended Pulaski County High, was active in its rodeo club and competed in about a dozen league contests throughout the school year and others outside the league.

This year, he's taken time out -- not from the rodeo, but from public school. As a home-schooled student, he has more time to practice his sports, team and calf roping, he said.

He and his team roping partner, C.D. Wilcox of Louisa, Fred Wilcox's son, concocted a plan to do schoolwork at home and practice together more. They split time living at each other's homes to cut down on the commute. It took some nudging, but finally they said yes.

"It's not about rodeo first, it's about school first," Fred Wilcox said.

Some universities, such as the University of Tennessee or Texas Tech, have rodeo teams. Beahm said his goal, aside from winning a national championship, is to earn a scholarship to college, as his brother did.

Mother Sally Beahm serves as a secretary for the state association. She said high school staff in Wythe County and elsewhere have talked to her about getting rodeo clubs started.

"I think it's growing, People are just now learning about it or hearing about and had no idea there was high school," she said.