The Block & Bridle Club at Pratt Community College had the largest membership in its history last year.  Block & Bridle is not the largest student organization on campus, but is recognized campuswide as one of the most active clubs on campus.

The club held its annual Ag Olympics in October during Rodeo Week.  The Olympics is a team event.  Team members complete a timed events course.  They move four bales of hay and restack it; strap on dryland skis and move as a group a specified distance (the skis were 2 long 2x8s with leather straps to hold the feet on); roll a tractor tire, a watermelon, a tennis ball, and a team member in a relay, rope a roping dummy; and run a barrel race with a blindfolded team member pushing another member in a wheelbarrow.  The top teams were all close, completing all events in just over one minute.  We had 6 teams enter this year.  The entry fee for each team was of four cans of food or $4.  Cash entry fees purchased additional canned food.  All of the food was donated to the Pratt County Food Bank.

At the PCC College Rodeo in October, the Block & Bridle Club held its annual Rodeo Breakfast.  We served more than 200 servings of biscuits and gravy at this year’s breakfast, along with orange juice, soft drinks, and doughnuts.  The club puts together this breakfast each year as a service to the contestants and spectators during the Saturday morning slack performance of the rodeo.

Also in October, the club hosted a team-roping event as a fundraiser.  The club made over $600.

A new fundraiser this year was a cookie mix sale.  We presold jars of dry cookie mix in November as a fundraiser for our national convention trip.  The cookie mix was packaged in a Mason jar and included all the dry ingredients needed for a batch of dark chocolate chip, white chocolate chip, or butterscotch cookies.  In early December, we all gathered in a lab room in Gwaltney Hall and put the various ingredients in the jars, cut the cloth squares for the tops, screwed on the lids, hot-glued a card, a recipe, and raffia to the top, and organized the jars for delivery.  We put together over 150 jars in about five hours work and made about $5 per jar.

In January, eight members and our advisor flew to Alexandria, Virginia, to attend National Convention.  We arrived a day early so we could see more of the sights.  We enjoyed a nighttime tour of the city lights and toured the Museum of American History and the Museum of Natural History in addition to the convention tours and sessions.  A highlight of the convention was our chapter president Britney Northrup being named as the winner of the National Block & Bridle Sophomore Scholarship.

This spring, our community service project involved going to a local elementary school to teach second graders the importance of soil in everyday life.  We took different samples of soil so that the children could distinguish the layers and types of soil in this area of Kansas.  Each student “built” a soil model using Butterfinger BB’s as parent material, vanilla pudding as the subsoil, crushed Oreos for the topsoil, and gummy worms for the earthworms that indicate a healthy soil.  As the students learned the different layers they were able to point them out in their “dirt”.  This was the second year for this project and it was a big hit with the students, teachers, and the club members.

On April 28, the club held a hamburger fry at Lemon Park in Pratt to celebrate the accomplishments of the year.  We enjoyed the burgers and played sand volleyball.