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HERE COME THE NASHVILLE STAMPEDE!
NASHVILLE STAMPEDE
The Music City now has its very own Professional Bull Riders expansion team
BY JENNIFER MCKEE
Coach Justin McBride with the team at a preseason event. Opposite page: The Stampede's Aaron Williams rides Yippee High Cowboy of Clark View Farms at that same event in Tryon, North Carolina.
Dolly Parton inside her tour bus, 1979. PHOTO: Raeanne Rubenstein
From the east to the west, tougher than the rest, way out in the lead. You can try to catch ’em but you’ll never get ’em, Stampede.”
So go the lyrics to Brice Long’s “Stampede,” the anthem of the newly formed Nashville Stampede, a Professional Bull Riders (PBR) Team Series club, one of eight founding teams that are part of this inaugural series, owned by Morris Communications Company (MCC), this publication’s parent organization.
“Our company is part of a long-standing and growing love affair with the West here in America and around the world,” says MCC Chairman and Morris family patriarch Billy Morris. “The Western mystique is powerful and getting bigger. It’s something people everywhere want to associate with. This new bull riding league plays right into this phenomenon, and we’re so proud to be a founding team associated with it.”
The Team Series transforms the individual nature of bull riding into a team sport, one in which riders compete as a group for a national championship title. The seasons consists of 28 games; at its end, the team with the highest aggregate score is the winner.
The Stampede chose PBR World Champion (2005 and 2007) Justin McBride as the team’s head coach and Brazil’s Kaique Pacheco, 2018 PBR World Champion, as team captain.
The Stampede call the Bridgestone Arena home, joining the Nashville Predators NHL team, which has played there since 1998.
For more information on the Stampede, visit pbr.com/teams/ stampede
