Far leaner S.A. stock show set for 2021
COVID-19 is forcing organizers of the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo, scheduled for Feb. 11-28, to go small.
Overall attendance will be held to about 120,000, according to Cody Davenport, the event’s executive director and CEO. That would be less than 10 percent of last year’s turnout of 1.5 million.
With far fewer visitors, the rodeo and concerts will move from the AT&T Center to the smaller Freeman Coliseum next door.
In addition to limiting seating for rodeo events and live music performances, organizers are scrapping the Family Fair, which in years past featured concerts on multiple stages, a petting zoo and food booths.
“It is a very reduced, watereddown version of the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo,” Davenport said.
And the tickets are already taken. Season ticket-holders have bought out the Freeman arena, according to Davenport.
“In a nutshell,” he said, “it’s not really open to the public.”
Season tickets start at $567 per seat.
Attendees will undergo temperature checks, and face masks will be mandatory.
“We’re very serious about protecting the public,” Davenport said.
Even in its shrunken state, the annual rite would be the biggest multiday event in San Antonio since the pandemic began in March.
With the recent spike in COVID-19 cases in the area, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff is worried about the safety of spectators.
“It’s a high-risk thing, I must say, because they will have a lot of people there,” he said. “It all depends on how well they handle it.”
Two big unknowns currently hang over the event: the number of people who will receive COVID-19 vaccine shots by February and where the area’s coronavirus rate will stand less than two months from now.
“Hopefully, we will be in a lot better shape,” Wolff said. “But we just have to be awful careful.”
Bexar County owns the AT&T Center and Freeman Coliseum. But under the rodeo’s long-term lease, Wolff said, county officials don’t have the power to stop the event.
Calling off the crowd-attracting Family Fair and cutting seating capacity should help mitigate some of the health risks, he said.
Last year, the rodeo sold 853,000 tickets.
State rules put in place by Gov. Greg Abbott allow rodeos and stock shows, but they’re held to half their normal capacity.
The San Antonio event attracts visitors from across the region and other parts of Texas, including numerous relatives and friends of livestock show contestants. Attendees fill area hotel rooms and patronize restaurants, helping boost a tourism industry that’s usually slow in February, even in the best of years.
Rodeo officials could eliminate much of the COVID-19 risk by requiring rapid antigen tests at the admission gates, said Benjamin Neuman, a Texas A&M University-Texarkana virologist. Without such testing, he said, the rodeo could become a super-spreader event.
Rapid testing helps identify people who carry the coronavirus but aren’t experiencing symptoms, such as coughing or difficulty breathing.
Neuman said test results would take about 15 minutes but are far more accurate than temperature checks in spotting carriers of the virus.
Temperature checks are “not a valid test of anything,” Neuman said. “Most people who have the virus don’t have a temperature.”
Rodeo officials said they currently have no plans for COVID-19 testing, which could create crowds of ticket-holders waiting to enter the grounds.
However, they said they’re still finalizing plans for the 18-day event.
Freeman Coliseum can hold 8,500 people for rodeo events, but Davenport said his organization is capping the number at 3,900 to comply with state rules.
The AT&T Center, the main venue for past rodeos, seats more than 17,000.
Organizers also cut the number of events to 16 from 22, with no daytime rodeos scheduled, as in previous years, to provide extra time to clean the arena.
Last year, country music stars such as Keith Urban and Brad Paisley entertained the crowds. The lineup of performers for the 2021 event won’t be as buzz-generating.
Performing Feb. 12, the country group Asleep at the Wheel will be one of the rodeo’s biggest-name acts.
Rodeo spokeswoman Lauren Sides said the smaller Freeman Coliseum can’t generate the revenue necessary to attract top performers.
Expect fewer food and merchandise booths, too.
Most of last year’s 200 food and merchandise vendors won’t be back in February. The number will drop to 51, with most of the booths located inside the coliseum, Davenport said.
Though the Family Fair won’t be an option for visitors, the annual carnival — with about 40 rides — will be. There’s no admission fee for the carnival.
Davenport said ride operator Wade Shows Inc. is establishing social distancing protocols, and the carnival could be limited to 20,000 people, down from 140,000 in 2020.
That makes Frank Zaitshik, president and CEO of Wade Shows, nervous. He’s concerned that he won’t make money if attendance is sharply limited.
“I would be very disappointed if he was accurate about the 20,000 number,” Zaitshik said.
Chris Derby, the Stock Show & Rodeo’s chief marketing officer, said carnival attendance numbers could go up, depending on the layout of the rides. The cap, he said, has yet to be finalized.
Davenport said his organization was determined to hold the Stock Show & Rodeo because it awards scholarships to livestock competition winners, as well as some competitors who don’t win. About 14,000 students per year, from fourth grade through high school, exhibit pigs, cows, goats, chickens and turkeys.
The livestock show culminates in an auction of the winning animals. With revenue expected to drop in February because of the event restrictions, part of the scholarship money will come from the nonprofit organization’s cash reserves, Davenport said.
“We are taking a major hit — a major financial, operational sacrifice,” he said.
It’s unlikely the scholarship money will equal the $12.2 million generated in 2020.
Some of Texas’ other major rodeos either have written off 2021or pushed parts of their events to later in the year.
Organizers of the Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo, originally scheduled for next month, canceled because of COVID-19 concerns.
The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, scheduled March 2-21, will hold its junior livestock exhibition and horseshoe competition as planned. But the rodeo has been rescheduled for May 4-23.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo has said she’s concerned about organizers going ahead with the rodeo, even at a later date.
“We still do not know if hosting a mass gathering like the rodeo in May will be feasible, safe or advisable, and it may well not be,” Hidalgo said in a statement earlier this month.
Also this month, Texas hosted the National Finals Rodeo at Arlington’s Globe Life Field, home of the Texas Rangers baseball team. The Dec. 3-12 event had been scheduled for Las Vegas, but that state’s rules would have restricted attendance to no more than 50 people.
Under Texas’ looser rules, more than 14,000 people attended the rodeo, which included auxiliary events such as a cowboy Christmas shopping market at the Fort Worth Convention Center.
About 13 percent of the roughly 1,000 people who voluntarily took rapid COVID-19 tests at several National Finals Rodeo events tested positive for the virus.
Davenport said San Antonio rodeo officials are being careful.
“We’re trying to do a very controlled plan so we can control all of these COVID protocols — because if we didn’t, all of our COVID planning could get away from us,” he said.