Wyatt Mann has been riding horses since he can remember.

Like many are this week, he would always participate in 4-H events during the Jackson County Fair, but it wasn’t until about five years ago when Mann decided to try something a little more complex: Rodeoing.

“It was hard in the beginning,” Mann said. “Once you start getting better, it gets easier.”

Mann, who is going to be an eighth-grader at Brownstown Central Middle School, recently got back from Guthrie, Oklahoma, where he qualified to compete for a world title.

“It was good. It was fun,” Mann said of his experience in Oklahoma. “We met a lot of new people.”

In February of this year, Mann was named All-Around Cowboy for the Midwest Youth Rodeo Association, where he won his first saddle.

A couple of months after that, Mann competed in the Indiana Junior High State Finals Rodeo and was awarded Reserve All-Around Cowboy, where he qualified to compete in the National Junior High Rodeo Finals in Perry, Georgia, in June.

The event in Georgia was the world’s largest junior high rodeo competition, which featured 1,200 contestants from 43 states, five Canadian provinces, Australia, Mexico and New Zealand.

Mann qualified to compete in the breakaway roping, ribbon roping and goat tie.

He described his process for each competition, saying how he and his family arrive on Friday, stay the night and practice Saturday morning to get ready for his runs on Saturday afternoon and Sunday.

For Mann’s events, all of them are timed. For example, in the breakaway roping, the fastest person to rope their calf wins.

“You need to have good hand-eye coordination, and you need to be able to ride a horse good,” Mann said.

His grandmother, Natalie Mann, said Wyatt’s 4-H instructor was big in helping him get started with rodeoing. She said it’s fun to watch Wyatt compete but admitted when he first starting rodeoing, it was a little scary to watch.

“It was nerve-racking,” she said. “We started in 4-H, and so that kind of got us started. His first rodeo was in Salem, and then the next year, we got a little bit bigger and went to Cloverdale. We just kept doing more and more.”

She noted how they’ve met a lot of people who rodeo in Indiana, and they’re typically all at the same events around the state each year.

Wyatt said he competes in four different rodeo associations, and each one of them has about five to seven rodeos in a season.

“When we’re not rodeoing, we’ll go to jackpots, and it’s like two hours long and you can go and win money,” Wyatt said.

For practices, Wyatt said he usually goes and ropes live calves once a week, and then he’ll rope the dummy about three or four days a week.

Wyatt has been off since competing in Oklahoma, but his first rodeo back will be in August. After that, he’ll have an event at the historic Freedom Hall in Louisville, Kentucky.

This is a sport Wyatt wants to keep doing for a long time. Individuals can receive rodeo scholarships to compete in college, and this Brownstown eighth-grader has his eyes set on that over the next couple of years he’ll be competing.

“It has been really fun,” he said.