PRCA Chief Looks to Move NFR Forward With Media and Sports-Science Numbers, While Baseball World Comes to Las Vegas This Week

 

By ALAN SNEL

LVSportsBiz.com

 

Just when Las Vegas’ sports industry was taking a high-tech turn to hosting esports events and being home to the NHL’s hottest, loudest showtime act, along comes two tradition-laden sports that have wedged their way into Sin City for some days here in mid-December.

 

While many sports evolve and try to appeal to the ever shifting trends of different demo groups, the National Finals Rodeo and Major League Baseball have brought their older demographics, deep-seated cultural lifestyles and history-loving fans to Las Vegas this week.

 

 

The NFR, with 60,000 western-lifestyle and horse folks descending on Sin City, is staging its nightly two-hour shows at Thomas & Mack Center Dec. 6-15. Meanwhile, Major League Baseball is holding its winter meetings (i.e. the Bryce Harper Watch) at Mandalay Bay Hotel-Casino through Wednesday.

 

LVSportsBiz.com stopped by both the baseball industry’s December Woodstock and the cowboys, horses and flying dirt of the NFR Monday. We sat down with the chief executive of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA), George Taylor, about two hours before the 6:45 PM NFR performance to find out how he plans to keep the Super Bowl of rodeos relevant in the years to come. Here’s a piece of that interview:

Taylor, 57, is completing his first year as CEO of the PRCA, a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based 5,000-member organization that sanctions more than 640 rodeos a year.

 

A former chief marketing officer for the Caterpillar construction equipment company, Taylor is a different personality than his predecessor, former PRCA chief Karl Stressman. Taylor had no rodeo production experience before starting the job in January and sized up the growth of NFR this way: “It’s a media game.”

 

The NFR, which packs Thomas & Mack Center nightly, is known for its precise production that includes contestants in seven categories, with both men and women competing in a show that lasts less than two hours.

 

But Taylor said he would like to include new wrinkles like using sensors to measure the speed of the contestants’ horses, the bulls’ G-forces and how high a horse bucked and integrate those numbers into the NFR show. Sports-science numbers are popular in other sports, too, like the exit velocity of a baseball off the bat. Taylor envisions adding the sports-science numbers to the NFR production in 2020.

 

He also would like to get more fans involved through fantasy sports, and try to expose the sport through streaming via all devices to the two-thirds of the country that live east of the Mississippi River.

 

Taylor observed the PRCA is a fan-driven organization and not a member-driven organization and it’s vital to “focus on the customers. They are the arbiter of sports.”

 

Both rodeos and baseball have vastly different sports cultures, but both have older demographics — it’s 50-52 for the PRCA-sanctioned rodeos and baseball is known for its older 50-something crowd that can tolerate the sport’s three-hours-plus games.

 

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Two miles from the NFR at Thomas & Mack is the baseball world at Mandalay Bay, where Major League Baseball general managers, managers and even new Hall-of-Famers like Harold Baines and Lee Smith roam the hallways of the convention ccnter. Remote radio booths are set up where the likes of Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo of Sirius endlessly chat on baseball, while former Yankees manager Joe Torre is discussing baseball on the YES Network.

 

 

Baseball even stages a trade show, complete with a job fair for minor league teams to hire young college students as interns. Jan Bell, a St. Thomas University professor and faculty athletics representative, helps put on the job fair. There are 500 jobs posted, Bell said, and 550 job seekers.

 

The rodeo and baseball worlds are visiting Las Vegas when hotel occupancy rates are low during this lull between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Fore example, in 2017 the first weekend of the NFR was the 47th ranked weekend out of 52 weeks in terms of hotel occupancy rates in Las Vegas, while the second weekend was the 50th ranked weekend, according to Las Vegas Events.

 

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