If you are at the Cumming Fairgrounds on Sunday night for the 20th annual International Professional Rodeo Association World Championship, in between the bull riding, calf roping and steer wrestling, you might see local 6-year-old Ella Bennett riding high on her horse, Frito, through the arena. 

She might be young and inexperienced, but friends and family say Bennett has shown courage and tenacity over the last half year as she has jumped head first into the rodeo world. 

“It’s so good to have her doing it, because she loves it and it’s just so much fun,” Eric Bennett, Ella’s dad, said on Wednesday. “We’ve become a horse family.”

Even though she’s really too young to compete at the rodeo in earnest, Ella rides in a rodeo event called barrel racing, where a horse and rider race around three barrels in a cloverleaf pattern, attempting to complete a circuit in the fastest time.

But according to Eric Bennett, his daughter’s age hasn’t stopped their family from traveling all over the nation from Texas to North Carolina, so that she can ride in rodeos and hone her skills with other young people. 

“Now she’s got the taste of competing,” he said with a chuckle. 

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Eric Bennett was once himself a professional rodeo competitor, but he gave up the rodeo life to start a family. To see his daughter grow and learn the same sport has been amazing, Eric Bennett said, and he’s seen her come a long way in the six months she has been practicing the barrel race.

“She doesn’t want to do anything else. Every night it’s, ‘I want to ride,’” he said. “This is all she wants to do; she eats, sleeps and drinks it, I reckon.”

Ella rides two or three times a week with trainers Presley Garland and Gracie Finley, Eric said, as well as some weekends to different areas around the state and country.

“For her to be involved in this and take to it the way she has, I wouldn’t trade it ... I’ll get teary-eyed talking about it.” he said. “This has been probably one of the best summers of going and traveling up the road with her.”

Midway through her training session on Wednesday, while changing saddles between two of the Bennett’s horses — Cheeto and Frito — Ella said that she loves barrel racing because it lets her go fast.

And no matter how fast they go, she says she’s never gets scared.

“It makes me a nervous wreck,” Ella’s mom, Ashley, said. “She’s a brave 6-year-old. I don’t know that I could do it the way she does it. She has no fear, she’s just a natural.”

But the rodeo community, according to Eric Bennett, is a tight knit one where people are watching out for each other’s safety.

“When she’s running, everybody out there is watching her, and if they see for one minute that something’s going to happen, they’ll be over that fence stopping that horse,” he said. “It’s just a different environment.”

This weekend, the Bennett family will travel to Pendleton, South Carolina so that Ella can compete in a pee-wee division barrel race on Saturday and Sunday, before returning to Cumming for the annual rodeo at the Fairgrounds.

Even with all the training, traveling and riding, Ella says she still can’t get enough.

“You’d stay up there all day if you could, wouldn’t you?” Bennett said to his daughter after Wednesday’s training session. 

“Yes,” she responded. “All night too, unless I got tired.”