By Michael Ahearne ’14
THE ROUNDUP

A group of students sit and watch as a man runs into trouble, gets into fights and rides his horse though a dusty desert landscape.

This man is a cowboy featured in a video clip, and this group of students is the Cowboy Club.

“Cowboy club is a fun social club, it’s not real big, but basically we just remember and celebrate the cowboy lifestyle, the spirit of the west,” said club president Matthew Gerveler ’13. “We come in at lunch and watch a movie. It’s pretty laid back.”

The club was originally started a few years ago by a student who had a ranch up in Dewey, Ariz., and was interested in preserving the cowboy tradition.

Last year after the club president left, some students wanted to continue the club, so they got back together and asked Mr. Chad Unrein to become the moderator.

“I said sure because I owned some horses and my family is involved in rodeo,” Mr. Unrein said.

So far, the Cowboy Club has mostly spent their meetings watching spaghetti westerns.

Over the course of the year, though, they have talked about doing more things in and outside of school.

Some of those ideas have been going to cowboy events or expos, going on trail rides, doing some Dutch oven cooking and more.

“In Cave Creek, where I live, there’s a place called the Buffalo Chip, and they have rodeos and a lot of cowboys go there. I am trying to get it so that I can get some people to come out and do that,”   Gerveler said.

The club has also starting making plans to do some service work.

“I talked to Mr. Unrein, and he said to get our volunteer hours, we can go to Horses Help,” Gerveler said.

Horses Help is an organization that helps mentally impaired people receive help and ride horses at the same time.

For some of these people, this is an opportunity that they would have never gotten the chance to do anywhere else.

For more information about this club, contact Matthew Gerveler, the club’s president.

See the Daily Bulletin for times and location for club meetings.