It is a Louisiana bareback rider’s rookie year and he is taking bareback riding by storm. Kade Sonnier currently sits No. 2 in the Resistol Rookie standings and No. 6 in the PRCA World Standings. It is a tough year to be a rookie in the bareback riding and coming into it, one might have thought that Sonnier would be the underdog since he didn’t start riding bareback horses until he was 20 years old. We are halfway through the season and the baseball star turned cowboy is at the top.
Sonnier grew up playing baseball and when he finished high school, he had a scholarship to play at Nicholls State University. He played there for three years before his baseball career was brought to a standstill.
“That’s when things kind of started to change for me. 2018 was a year I will never forget. It brought my baseball career to a standing halt and at the same time, my dad was having a bunch of success rodeoing. In October, found out that my elbow was torn, and my baseball career could be done and my dad had made the NFR in the saddle bronc riding for the first time at 39 years old,” Sonnier said.
It was when Sonnier was in the stands of the Thomas and Mack watching his dad that he knew the rodeo arena is where he wanted to be. After the NFR was his Tommy John surgery followed by the realization that his elbow did not come back the same 10 months later.
“So I thought bareback riding was going to be a safer option. And I told my dad that I wanted to quit baseball and start riding bareback horses and he told me that I had lost my ever-loving mind,” he said.
With a tribe of National Finals qualifiers to help him along the way, Sonnier started his bareback riding journey in January 2020. This consisted of getting a riggin from Jake Brown and guidance from his dad and David Fournier.
“We started at ground zero. I was clueless. From then on, I kept losing some weight and got on a saddle hors, riding around in the round pen and rode that everyday with a bareback riggin around in the round pen for, I don’t know, two months,” he said.
On March 13, Sonnier climbed on his first bareback horse at McNeese State University.
“It lit a fire. It was fun and I loved it. Everybody whooping and hollering and cheering me on. It was immediately a camaraderie,” Sonnier said.
Sonnier’s progression in the sport of bareback riding earned him a scholarship to rodeo for McNeese State where he transferred the next semester.