Baldwin County’s rodeo season kicks off next week when the Jennifer Claire Moore Foundation brings its 28th annual professional rodeo to the Robertsdale Arena. The three-night event, scheduled for Aug. 6 through Aug. 8, pairs high-energy bull riding with a family-friendly atmosphere while raising money for youth mental health programs across the county.
The rodeo will be held at the Robertsdale Arena, located at 19477 Fairground Road, a longtime gathering spot for agricultural and community events in south Baldwin County. Organizers say the arena setting gives the rodeo an authentic, small-town feel that has helped the event grow into one of the region’s most anticipated summer traditions.
Robertsdale sits at the crossroads of U.S. 59 and Alabama 104 in the middle of the county, close enough to Foley, Summerdale and Silverhill that the arena draws families from every corner of south Baldwin on a rodeo night. The fairground has hosted livestock shows, festivals and fundraisers for decades, and its wide dirt floor and grandstand give the rodeo a setting no indoor venue could copy: dust, floodlights, and a horizon of pine trees beyond the chutes.
The rodeo kicked off as planned Thursday night at the Robertsdale Arena, with children taking part in calf scrambles and interactive corral games ahead of the main event. Madeline Crawley, director of marketing for the Jennifer Claire Moore Foundation, said the organization has deep roots in the Baldwin County community. “This foundation is so special. Not only are we just deeply, deeply rooted in this community for so many years… Our main goal is to, our tagline is ‘Gathering goodness, spreading hope,’ and that’s all we really wanna do. We wanna gather all of the goodness in this community and we want to spread hope to anybody that needs it or whatever way that may look like,” Crawley said.
A foundation built around young people
The foundation carries the name of Jennifer Claire Moore, a Baldwin County teenager whose death made her family and friends determined that other young people facing grief, depression or crisis would not face it alone. What began as a memorial effort grew into an organization that works directly with the county’s schools, funding counseling and peer-support programs, hosting student retreats and grief groups, and putting resources into the hands of teachers and coaches who see struggling students before anyone else does.
That mission explains the strange but effective pairing at the heart of the rodeo. A professional rodeo draws the crowds and the dollars; the programs it funds reach teenagers in classrooms from Gulf Shores to Bay Minette. Over nearly three decades the event has become the foundation’s signature fundraiser, and for many Baldwin County families the first weekend of August is now marked on the calendar as much for what the night supports as for the bull riding itself.
Youth mental health has moved steadily up the list of priorities for Alabama school systems, and Baldwin County is no exception. School counselors carry caseloads that stretch across thousands of students, and outside programs like the ones the foundation supports provide what the system budget cannot: grief groups for children who have lost parents, peer leadership training that teaches students to recognize warning signs in classmates, and crisis resources distributed in every high school in the county. The rodeo’s proceeds flow into that network year after year.
What to Expect Each Night
Each evening of the rodeo follows the same schedule. Gates open at 5 p.m., giving families plenty of time to find seating, visit vendors, and settle in before the action begins. At 5:30 p.m., the kids’ corral opens, offering younger attendees a chance to get up close with the rodeo experience in a supervised, low-key setting. The marquee event, professional rodeo competition, begins at 7:30 p.m. each night.
Riders competing come from the Professional Cowboy Association and are considered among the top competitors in the sport, taking on bull riding and the other standard rodeo events — bareback and saddle bronc riding, calf roping, steer wrestling and barrel racing — in front of a grandstand that fills early on all three nights.
Bull riding is the draw that sells out the bleachers, and everyone connected with the sport knows why. A two-thousand-pound animal bred to buck, a rider holding on with one hand for eight seconds, and a pickup crew of professional bullfighters standing between the fallen rider and the horns — the combination is as raw as any sport gets. But a full rodeo is broader than its finale, and the Robertsdale program is built so that every member of the family has something to watch from the first event to the last.
The early-evening hours are designed for the youngest crowd. Calf scrambles and corral games put children in the arena dirt with the animals in a controlled setting, and the kids’ corral lets them meet riders, pet stock and get a feel for the rodeo world before the professional competition begins. Longtime organizers describe those hours as the part of the night that keeps young families coming back, turning a one-time visit into an August tradition that passes to the next generation.
Why the money matters
Three nights of rodeo in a county the size of Baldwin adds up to a serious fundraising engine. Attendance across the weekend typically reaches thousands of spectators, with ticket sales, vendor fees, sponsorships and concession proceeds all feeding the foundation’s programs. The Baldwin County school system is one of the largest in Alabama, spanning more than a dozen municipalities and unincorporated communities across a county bigger in area than any other in the state, which means a youth mental health program that works in Gulf Shores has to be adapted to work in Bay Minette as well. The foundation’s reach into each school community is what the rodeo underwrites.
The county’s rapid growth has raised the stakes. Baldwin County has been among the fastest-growing counties in Alabama for two decades, and every year brings new families, new students and new pressures on the counseling infrastructure. Children arrive carrying the stresses of moves, family disruption and, on the coast, the special anxieties of a tourism economy where parents work long summer seasons. Programs that pair professional counselors with trained peer leaders have become a model other counties study, and the rodeo’s proceeds keep Baldwin’s version running.
The foundation’s tagline — gathering goodness, spreading hope, in Crawley’s words — is more than a slogan for the volunteers who run the event. Rodeo week mobilizes hundreds of them: board members coordinating stock contractors and judges, school staff signing up student volunteers, civic clubs staffing gates, and local businesses sponsoring chutes and events. In a county that still organizes itself around its schools and its churches, a fundraiser that ties both to a night of family entertainment has a reach few galas could match.
Rodeo country on the Gulf Coast
South Alabama has long been rodeo country. The agricultural roots that run through Baldwin County — cattle operations, timber, and farm families that go back generations — give the region an authentic connection to the sport that resort towns along the beach cannot claim. Stock contractors who supply rodeos across the Southeast know the Robertsdale dates, and competitors use the early-August stop to tune up for the fall run of Southeastern rodeos.
The arena itself has that history in its dirt. Generations of Baldwin County 4-H members showed livestock on the fairground, and community celebrations from harvest festivals to fundraising barbecues have used the grounds since before the rodeo found a home there. The venue’s rustic character is a selling point Crawley and other organizers lean into: there are no luxury suites and no stadium video boards, just grandstand seating close enough to hear the bull’s hooves hit the ground and a fence line where children gather three deep to watch the bucking chutes open.
That accessibility is part of why the event has lasted 28 years. Ticket prices are set for working families; the schedule starts early enough that young children can enjoy the full evening; and the proceeds stay visibly local, funding programs in the very schools whose students fill the stands. Few fundraisers anywhere on the Gulf Coast connect a community’s entertainment, its agricultural traditions and its most urgent social need as directly as this one does.
The week ahead
With Thursday’s opening night completed on schedule, two nights remain, Friday and Saturday, and organizers expect the weekend crowds to build as word of the competition spreads through the county. Gates open at 5 p.m. each evening, the kids’ corral follows at 5:30, and the professional competition begins at 7:30. Families planning to attend are advised to arrive early; grandstand seating fills as the 7:30 start approaches, particularly on Saturday night.
For the foundation, the event’s success is measured after the bleachers empty — in the counseling programs funded for the coming school year, the student retreats scheduled for the fall, and the grief groups that will meet in Baldwin County classrooms because a community turned out for bull riding in August. For the county, the rodeo has become what Crawley described: a gathering of the community’s goodness, aimed at spreading hope to whoever needs it. Twenty-eight years in, the formula still works, and the first weekend of August belongs to the arena on Fairground Road.