Walking inside the Thomas and Mack and seeing those infamous yellow bucking chutes for the first time is something every rodeo fan remembers vividly. For Kade Sonnier, this moment came in 2018 while watching his dad compete at the National Finals Rodeo. Although unaware at the time, those nights he spent sitting in the stands watching the best fifteen athletes in each of their respective events, had the power to change the trajectory of his life entirely.
Twenty-three-year-old Kade Sonnier grew up in the small town of Carencro, Louisiana where he was raised primarily by his mother. His father, NFR saddle bronc rider Joey Sonnier, was in and out of his life as he was off rodeoing and at the time struggled with drug addiction.
As a kid, Kade stayed busy by being heavily involved in sports playing football, baseball, soccer, and basketball. A few times a month he would enter youth rodeos in the steer riding or breakaway roping, but rodeo was something he viewed more as a hobby rather than a sport. Kade continued to play football until his senior year of high school but chose to pursue his dream of becoming a professional baseball player by accepting a scholarship to play college baseball at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana.
All his hard work and dedication to baseball seemed to be coming together as Sonnier was now playing at the collegiate level and had a starting position on the team. That was up until the spring of 2018 when things took a turn.
“At the beginning of the season, I dove for a ball in the outfield and my shoulder just popped out. It was no big deal at first but then there was just no strength in it,” explained Sonnier.
In March of 2018, Kade would have his first surgery to repair his labrum and get four anchors put into his left shoulder. “It was trying more than anything just to see your buddies take your spot. It was a little bit that my pride was hurt,” Kade recalled regarding the five-month recovery process.
By the fall semester just seven months after his shoulder surgery, Sonnier was feeling good and ready to get back out on the baseball field. It was during a scrimmage with Louisiana State University when Kade popped up to throw the ball from behind the plate to second base that he felt a pop in his elbow and knew something wasn’t right.
“I threw on it for about two weeks before I ever told my coaches or a doctor because I had just gotten off one surgery – I didn’t want to be hurt and have another one or sit out any longer. I felt like I was far enough behind.”
As time progressed, Kade came to the realization that he didn’t have any velocity or accuracy when throwing the ball – two things that are crucial when it comes to catching. After receiving an MRI and getting two different opinions from doctors, they found that his UCL was torn, resulting in his second surgery in just one year.
During the same year, Kade’s dad, Joey, was traveling the country competing at rodeos. He finished 13th in the regular season, qualifying him for his very first NFR in the saddle bronc riding in 2018. Not being able to play baseball, Kade decided to finish his college finals and fly out to Las Vegas to watch his dad compete.
“I got to go to eight nights and watch the Finals. Every night that I stood for the National Anthem, I had tears in my eyes, I still get tears in my eyes thinking about it,” said Sonnier reminiscing about the moment inside the Thomas and Mack. “There was nothing that I’ve ever been a part of, nothing that I had ever stood for – no game I had ever been to that had ever tugged on my heart and touched me in that way.”
While he watched his dad from the stands live out his dreams riding broncs at the highest level, Kade sat unaware of his future in baseball. “My dad’s having an outrageous amount of success and I just couldn’t find where I was happy at. Everyone’s so happy and full of joy and there are so many good things going on, but nothing can go right for me.”
The following year, Kade had come back from surgery receiving a whole new collateral ligament in his arm. This resulted in his throwing being weak and even after a year, his arm was nowhere near where it needed to be for baseball.
“Pretty much all of 2019 I was trying to get my arm back to the way it was and when I did try to throw hard, it would hurt, and it just wouldn’t feel right. I was frustrated, I was angry, I was lost because after two years of having surgeries, what had been my whole life – an athlete, a baseball player – was taken from me and I didn’t know who I was.”
On January 14, 2020, Kade walked into his baseball coach’s office and told him that he quit.
“I had never quit anything a day in my life, and I don’t ever plan on quitting anything ever again. I like to tell myself that I retired but I quit. I quit on my team, I quit on myself, I quit on a dream.” Kade found himself feeling lost and unsure of what to do next.
Just four days after he made the decision to quit baseball, on January 18th Sonnier received a call from the Nicholls State University track and field coach. She asked if he would fill the last spot on their team so that they’d be eligible to compete that season. She wanted him to throw the javelin which he had no idea how that would go considering he couldn’t throw a baseball at the time, but something was telling him that he needed to do it – so he did. The first track meet they went to was at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana and that same weekend, his dad had arranged for him to meet with bareback rider Jake Brown to get his first bareback riggin.
“I thought it was very coincidental at the time but really looking back on it, it was just God making everything work out the way it needed to be. I ran track at an indoor track and field meet that morning and then that night, I hung out with Jake who was riding at the Pro Rodeo here in Lake Charles.”
After the rodeo that same night with the help of bareback rider Waylon Bourgeois, Kade put his new riggin on the bucking machine, and for the next two months, two to three times a day, he got on the spur board and practiced.
“I didn’t know if I was doing it right, but I’d video myself every time and I’d send different videos to different people – Jake Brown, Waylon [Bourgeois], and my dad had put me in touch with Tilden Hooper. My dad didn’t know exactly what he was talking about [with bareback riding], but he knew people who did, and those guys tried to help me as much as they could just base off videos and looking at what I was doing.”
Shortly after, another pivotal person entered Sonnier’s life – multiple time NFR qualifier David Fournier who still to this day is one of Kade’s biggest mentors. While traveling to Lake Charles with David to see his son, Shae, they picked up Kade’s dad and on March 13, 2020 – a day he’ll never forget – he got on his very first bareback horse.
“I don’t even know if I’d call it a real bucking horse, but it was the first horse with a flank that I’d ever got on, and a fire was lit,” remembered Kade.
Now determined to ride bucking horses, Sonnier made the decision to transfer schools to McNeese State University in Lake Charles and compete on the rodeo team for coach Justin Browning. “I’m thankful that Justin decided to take some baseball player in and try to turn him into a bareback rider.”
Just a year and a half later, Kade graduated school and made the college finals for the first time. He had gained an enormous amount of confidence, was figuring out how to use his feet, and knew his riding was evolving. The plan was to go back to McNeese to complete his master’s but after finding his rhythm that summer, just two weeks before school started Kade called Justin and let him know he wasn’t coming back – he was going to rodeo.
Towards the middle of August, his traveling partners had to return to school at McNeese and Kade was on his own. “I went a month of rodeoing and I realized that I wasn’t near where I wanted to be, and something was calling me back to school.” Sonnier was sitting in Stephenville, Texas when he got a call from David telling him that he thought he should go back to school. He felt as though Kade could benefit from the structure and stability school provided along with being back in a team atmosphere to help his riding. After getting that advice from David, he decided to go back to school to pursue his master’s – one of the best decisions he said he ever made.
“I give a lot of the credit to God for leading me to the places He wanted me to be because, without him, these people might not have picked up the phone and called me and told me where to be or that I needed to come back to school. Or He might not have put it in my heart that I needed to be rodeoing.”
Now back at McNeese State University, as the months progressed, Kade saw his riding being taken to another level. At the beginning of 2023, he’d go on to win rodeos in Odessa, San Antonio, place in Florida, and have continued success throughout the year. Just in the month of July, Kade won the bareback riding championship title at the Calgary Stampede and Cheyenne Frontier Days – two rodeos most cowboys only ever dream of winning let alone claiming the title at both in the same year.
“Up until this point, I’m not done. I have a lot of goals and dreams that I want to pursue and a lot of things that I plan on doing. Hopefully I can stay healthy, and the good lord can continue to take care of me and continue to bless me with opportunities. When I set out to do this, I always wanted to be the best there ever was.”
Kade Sonnier is having a record-book rookie year in rodeo currently sitting third in the bareback world standings and is well on his way to making his first National Finals Rodeo this year.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be a seven-time champion bareback rider – I don’t know if I’ll ever make it into the ProRodeo Hall of Fame. This might be the only year I make the National Finals – but if my story affects one person and gets them to know God and gets them to trust God and changes their life and lets them know they can chase a dream, and they can have goals and they are accomplishable – then that’s all that matters to me because at the end of the day, I feel like that’s why God has put me on this path to do. God allowed these injuries to happen for me to learn that He knew what was best and I think that’s honestly how I’ve been able to have a lot of success as far as in the arena. I know wholeheartedly that God has had a plan all along.”
