For many years now, there have been Colorado cowboys and cowgirls who, holding regular jobs and unable to travel during the week, were unable to compete with the full time professional. In many cases, these were husband and wife teams and families who preferred to rodeo together. So the contestants banded together, first as the Colorado State Rodeo Association and later as the Colorado Professional Rodeo Association.
The CPRA is a nonprofit association, supervised by a board of directors made up of member cowboys and cowgirls. Each board member donates their expertise and an enormous amount of time each year. In addition to the directors, the volunteer list includes rodeo contestants and fans from throughout Colorado. These volunteers supply everything from technical to legal advice in support of our association.
While the core of the CPRA is the rodeo family, we strongly support the youth of our state as evidenced by our many young single members. We provide a special membership for high school age contestants and a college scholarship program available to our young members, which we are very proud of.
The CPRA supports each of their rodeo committees with professional stock contractors, announcers, timers, judges and rodeo secretaries. Our contestants are true professionals and together we work everyday to protect and maintain the heritage and tradition of rodeo and western way of life. The CPRA is 600 members strong and with the recent growth of our rodeos and success of our finals, we hope to become even bigger.