The Long Ride Home — Ben Londo

Ben Londo didn’t set out to revolutionize college rodeo. He set out to keep 18 kids in the saddle. That was 2013, the year he took over the Cal Poly Rodeo program, and 12 years later his roster sits at 125 student-athletes, his rodeo team is one of the most grit-driven in the country, and the event they dreamed up on a closed-down beach during COVID has become a fully ticketed, two-night production with concerts, a $10,000 purse, and a documentary that just took home a Wrangler Award. Not bad for a kid from Long Creek, Oregon.

The Londo name has been on the back of bronc riders for four generations. Ben’s great-grandfather rode rough stock, his grandfather rode rough stock, and his father rode rough stock before, and then again after, his time in Vietnam. Once returned home, his dad then attended Cal Poly. By age 10, climbing on something with a flank strap wasn’t a question of if, it was a question of when for young Ben. He started in Pee Wee rodeo, worked through high school, and earned a scholarship to Cal Poly, his dad’s school. He thought he wanted to be an architect, since Cal Poly’s architecture program was top-ranked. The desk held him for two years before construction management took his attention for the rest of his college years.

In the arena he was not slow either. He won a Bareback Riding Championship and two All-Around Championship titles at the College National Finals Rodeo, joined the PRCA in 2004, graduated in 2007 with a B.S. in Construction Management, and went on to win four Columbia River Circuit Saddle Bronc titles and three California Saddle Bronc championships. He rodeoed professionally for a total of 15 years, battling knee injuries and several knee reconstructions along the way. During the downtime between injuries and recoveries, he leaned on the construction degree he had earned and started a small company on the side. The work kept him above water during bad weeks on the rodeo road, and it taught him something the arena never had, which was how to run a business.

In 2011 the Cal Poly head coach job came open, and the Boosters reached out to Ben. He had led the team through coaching turnover during his playing days, and they trusted him. He turned it down. He had just signed some construction contracts that had him committed for over a year, and the timing didn’t align. He kicked himself for a year. The person they hired didn’t work out, the job opened back up, and this time Ben put his name in. He started in the fall of 2013 with 18 kids on the roster.

Twelve years later, the Cal Poly Rodeo program is one of the most respected in the country. One NIRA Coach of the Year award on the wall, earned in 2019, and a Regional Rodeo of the Year nod. A 125-student team that runs roughly 65 percent female. A practice schedule built in tight one-hour blocks from 6 a.m. to late afternoon, so a girl with calculus at 9 a.m. and a shift at 6 p.m. can still rope calves and get her life done. A complete practice facility within walking distance of campus, the Cotton Rosser Rodeo Complex, named for one of the original founding members of the Cal Poly rodeo program and dedicated in 2022 alongside the launch of the $5 million Cotton Rosser Rodeo Endowment. A one-year Master of Agricultural Education program pairing assistant coaches with sponsor internships, sending graduates into careers at Miller International, Pro Equine Group, Quinn Caterpillar and Teton Ridge.

The coaching staff Ben has built around him reflects the same philosophy. Quintin McWhorter, the 2023 Intercollegiate National Saddle Bronc Champion, coaches the rough stock side. Chelsey Bushnell, a two-time CNFR qualifier and WPRA California Champion, anchors the women’s roping pipeline. Special recognition goes to Drew Tilton, whose leadership as assistant coach helped shape the program’s daily operations and mentored countless students during his time with the team. Ben gives almost none of the credit to himself, instead crediting the support of Cal Poly’s and a strong network of alumni and boosters. “I walked into a perfect storm,” he says, pointing to a new university president who was a rodeo fan, a new dean of agriculture who outworked everybody in the room, and a community of boosters and alumni ready to push.

Cal Poly receives several dozen rodeo-program applications a year and admits a large number of them, every one of them academically elite, and yet Ben turns no one away from the team itself. Walk-ons, beginners, and kids who have never thrown a rope at a calf are all welcome through the Beginning Rodeo class, AG 243. He tells the story of a young woman who kept applying after getting turned down, finally got in, and is now one of the most competitive ropers on his team. “There’s a niche for everybody in this program,” he says.

The team lives by a creed called The Trail, eight lines that define what it means to be a Cal Poly rodeo athlete:

We are Cal Poly Mustangs. We show up early, ready, and focused. We compete with purpose and drive. We respect and care for each other and our animals. We are positive and grateful. We pursue excellence in all we do. We are a team and we ride for the brand. We live this vision and stay on the trail.

Ben circles back to that creed constantly, especially the line about gratitude, because it’s the thing he wants his students to carry off campus more than buckles or scholarship checks. “It seems to rub off on them,” he says, “and they’re very driven themselves.”

Then there is BreakaWave, the event nobody but Ben Londo and his students could have built. It was 2021, the tail end of COVID, and college rodeo was at a standstill. Cal Poly had kept practicing under heavy safety protocols, and the kids were holding it together through Zoom classes and socially distanced practice pens. State parks were the first public spaces to reopen, and Ben and graduate student DeLisa Fracchia started sketching something the rodeo world had never seen: a breakaway roping competition on the sand at Oceano Dunes State Park. Ben walked into the State Parks office and asked, and they said yes. The first event was free and open to the public, with twenty-five Cal Poly women roping calves out of a 260-foot three-sided arena, the open side facing the Pacific. A few hundred people watched from the dunes as Haleigh Grant was crowned the first-ever BreakaWave Finale Champion.

The next year Yeti sent its marketing team out from Texas, and the rodeo world started paying attention. By the third annual event in 2023, the crowd had pushed past 2,500 and the profits from that event averaged $80,000 towards the Cal Poly Rodeo scholarship budget. Cal Poly hired MakeLine Productions to film, and what they captured ended up far bigger than a recap. The crew embedded with the team for the full build cycle, documenting the planning, the practice, the bonds between athletes, and the long hours of arena assembly between tides. The result was a feature-length documentary called BreakaWave: A Cal Poly Rodeo Documentary, and in March of 2024 the Cowboy Channel, a Western cable network spanning 42 million homes, premiered it nationwide. Two months later it premiered live for the public at the Cal Poly Performing Arts Center.

By 2024 the live event was drawing 3,000 people to the beach, with all 119 team members on the sand setting up two adjacent arenas between tide windows. Six teams made up of 24 breakaway ropers competed head-to-head, with bareback and saddle bronc rides between rounds. By 2025, with production partner Outriders stepping in to help with the combination of production and musical entertainment, BreakaWave had become a fully ticketed two-night event with a $10,000 purse, $100 general admission tickets, and concerts headlined by Midland and Ryan Bingham and the Texas Gentlemen. Although the Outriders partnership has brought some professional support, Cal Poly rodeo students still put in significant legwork, knowing that the proceeds benefit their scholarship budgets.

In February of 2026 the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum honored BreakaWave: A Cal Poly Rodeo Documentary with the Wrangler Award for Western Lifestyle Program at its 65th Western Heritage Awards. The Wrangler is the most prestigious recognition in Western film and television, and Cal Poly’s documentary stood among the year’s honorees alongside Broke starring Wyatt Russell and AMC’s Dark Winds. Ben quietly says it was one of the proudest moments he has had in this job.

Ben has three kids. The oldest, Liam, is more entertainer than competitor. At twelve he dressed as a rodeo clown, got hired by the UNLV coach for $500 to work the West Coast regional finals, wrote his jokes on his wrists, and performed in front of 3,500 people. The middle boy competes in junior rodeo and three other sports, and the five-year-old wants to do everything. Ben’s role at Cal Poly is shifting too. He has hired four assistant coaches this year and is spending less time in the practice pen and more time in a director role managing donor relations, spearheading Cal Poly rodeo events, and supporting bigger university initiatives. “My intent is to backfill with better coaches than me,” he says, “and keep the best opportunities in front of the students.”

This year Poly Royal Rodeo moved back to the Alex G. Spanos Stadium for the first time since 2019, after four years of selling out the Manfred and Jean Sander Arena at the Cotton Rosser Rodeo Complex on campus. The 84th annual rodeo ran April 9 through 11 and tied the homecoming back to the stadium to Cal Poly’s and the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences 125th anniversary, with per night capacity climbing from 3,000 to more than 12,800. Student night sold out soon after launch, and total attendance across the three days reached just under 32,000. Down the coast, BreakaWave is positioning itself for significant growth.

Ben sees BreakaWave growing into a world-class Western showcase, with multiple nights of rodeo and music, expanded sponsorships, and collaborations with the surf and skate worlds that share the sand with him. He talks about a documentary series rather than a one-off film. He talks about tide windows the way other producers talk about budgets, because the tide is the budget on a beach event, and well in advance he can already tell you when high tide will hit on those exciting summer nights. Media opportunities are opening new doors for deeper national television integration. “Watching broncs buck with the sun setting over the ocean,” he says, “there is just nothing like it anywhere else.”

What Ben Londo is building, in the end, is bigger than any one event. Ask him what he wants his legacy at Cal Poly to be, and he will go quiet. He is not the kind of man who rehearses one. What he does have is a program that turns 4.0 students into rodeo athletes and rodeo athletes into industry leaders, a women’s roping event that has helped the West Coast reclaim a piece of its own Western heritage, a Wrangler-winning documentary, and a team creed that circles around gratitude. A program that started with 18 kids on a roster is now 125 strong, with a beach event the rodeo world is watching closely and a building campaign that will give the next generation a facility worthy of what’s already been built around it. That is the trail Ben Londo is blazing, and the support behind him continues to grow every year.

— Written and Photographed by Dee Yates