NJHSRA member, Conner Halverson – courtesy of the family
story by Ruth Nicolaus
Conner Halverson keeps a special picture in an envelope in his room.
It’s a picture of him in third grade, standing with his heroes: bull riders J.B. Mauney, Kody Lostroh, and Shane Proctor, taken at a PBR event in Rapid City, S.D.
And now the 14-year-old cowboy is doing what they do: riding bulls.
Conner, who lives in Gordon, Neb., is in his first year of competition in the Nebraska Junior High School Rodeo Association. At the age of three, he already knew he wanted to ride bulls. “He fell asleep in the recliner watching the PBR every night it was on,” his mother Marika remembered. Then after he rode a steer at the Gordon Co. Fair at the age of eight, he was hooked. “I fell off,” he remembers, “but everything about it, the surroundings, I wanted to do more.”
Since then, he’s attended two rodeo schools where he’s learned more. He went to the rodeo Bible camp at Mason City, Neb, in 2014, and a rodeo school in Kyle, S.D. earlier this year, and both have helped. “The more I get on, the better I get,” he said.
Conner is an eighth grade student at Gordon-Rushville Middle School. He enjoys school, and the best part is lunch. He packs his own lunches, and he’s hungry by lunch time. “I’m starving by the time lunch rolls around. I’m ready to eat.” The worst part of the school day is language arts, partly because it’s right after noon recess and the room is hot. “We go outside and play kickball, and that classroom is always 100 degrees,” Conner said. The school has air conditioning, but that room is always hot.
Conner is on the football team, wrestles, runs track, is on the honor roll, and is a member of the Green Valley 4-H Club.
For fun, he loves to shoot, fish, ride the four-wheeler at his buddy’s house, ride horses, and get on the bucking barrel.
Someday he’d like to be a professional bull rider, and maybe he can pose with another third grade boy and inspire someone else’s dream.
Conner has a sister, Madison, who is nine, and a brother, Jackson, who is two. He is the son of Eric and Marika Halverson.
