A Youth Rodeo Has Run at Murray State for Nearly a Decade. This Season It Was Told No.

The short version: The Western Kentucky Little Britches Rodeo Association says Murray State informed it on July 28 that the university could not host its season at the Bill Cherry Expo Center. Murray State publishes no facility-use policy for the Expo Center, no rate sheet, and no working public calendar.

The kids ride in age brackets that start in kindergarten and run to the first year of college. They qualify through the season for a national finals in Oklahoma City. For most of the last decade the qualifying happened in Murray, on the dirt floor of the Bill Cherry Exposition Center.

On a Tuesday afternoon in late July, that ended by phone.

The Western Kentucky Little Britches Rodeo Association posted its own account on August 1, and it is short enough to read whole:

That Tuesday was July 28. Nearly a week later the post is still the newest thing on their page, and no replacement venue has been named.

The Murray Ledger & Times reported the move, with Jennifer Loehr, who runs the western Kentucky franchise with her husband Shawn, saying recent university policy changes forced the search and that the season will likely start late while she hunts a venue. The paper carries Murray State's side of it, behind a subscription wall. That portion is not characterized here, and the university has not commented on the record elsewhere.

Bigger than one fall.

The association's own posted schedule, still showing the 2025-2026 season because nothing newer has gone up, lists eight rodeo weekends running from mid-September to the first weekend of May. Seven of the eight were in Murray. The one exception was a November stop at Oak Grove, out toward Fort Campbell. Two of the eight carry strike-throughs, so eight is the plan and something short of eight is what happened.

That is worth pinning down, because the Ledger describes a six-weekend season this fall. Those are two different shapes, and the difference matters to anyone trying to understand what Murray actually loses. A six-weekend autumn is a busy season. Eight weekends spread across three-quarters of the year is a tenant.

The building is also mid-repair. Board of Regents minutes from June 2025 record a completed roof replacement and a phased interior project starting with restrooms, then windows and doors.

Almost nothing.

Nothing on murraystate.edu carries a facility-use policy for the Expo Center. Not the Expo Center pages, not the Hutson School of Agriculture pages, not the Board of Regents policy manual index or the posted agendas and minutes. There is no rental agreement template and no rate card. A group that wanted to know what it costs to bring an event to the building, or what the terms are, cannot find out by looking.

There is no public calendar either. The university's own Expo Center calendar page is titled Calendar of Events and contains no calendar. It carries a single line: "Event information can be found by visiting our Facebook Page or by calling 270.809.3936." The Facebook page it points to returns "This content isn't available right now." The Murray Convention and Visitors Bureau calendar, which exists to tell people what is happening in town, is currently showing 191 listings across the next eleven months. Not one of them is at the Expo Center.

The single thing the public can actually book online is a $25 hourly slot to ride in the arena, through a Square link on the building's own page.

So a state university's regional event venue, a building with an arena floor and 1,374 seats, currently offers the public a booking page for one-hour riding sessions, a phone number, and a dead link.

It is not a scandal. Universities reconsider how outside groups use their buildings all the time, and there may be a perfectly ordinary reason involving liability, staffing, or the renovation.

It is a transparency problem, and that one is verifiable from a phone. When a decade-long tenant learns by phone that a season is off, the first thing anyone should be able to do is look up the rules. In this case there are no rules to look up, no rate to compare against, and no calendar to check whether anyone else has been told the same thing. Whether other groups were affected cannot be determined, because Murray State publishes no list of what is booked in the building.

That is the finding. Not the decision. The fact that the public has no way to examine it.

Murray State is under a new president, Dr. Ron K. Patterson, invested in April. The Board of Regents next meets in late August.

Unresolved: whether a written policy exists and what it says, who approved the change, whether the Board of Regents acted, and whether any other group was told the same. None of it is posted.

The kids will ride this season. The association said so plainly, and it is the only firm commitment anybody has made in writing so far.

Who is affected? The Western Kentucky Little Britches Rodeo Association, a nonprofit whose competitors range from kindergarten age to first-year college students and qualify through the season for a national finals in Oklahoma City.

Is the season canceled? No. The association says rodeos will happen. It says the start will likely be delayed while it finds a venue, and it has not announced one.

Why did Murray State say no? The university's explanation ran in the Murray Ledger & Times behind a subscription wall and is not characterized here.

Can I read the policy myself? No. Murray State posts no facility-use policy or rate sheet for the Expo Center.

What is the Expo Center? Murray State's indoor arena and event building, with a dirt floor 100 by 230 feet and seating for 1,374, currently working through a phased renovation.

One ask: 270 Daily is free, every weekday morning.