Meet this year’s Yuma Jaycees rodeo queen

YUMA, Ariz. (KYMA, KECY) - The rodeo is back and many are heading out to enjoy the show along with the great food and shopping. While you’re out there you might run into the beautiful rodeo queen.

It's day two of the Yuma Jaycees Silver Spur Rodeo. Things kicked off with announcing this year’s rodeo queen.

After most rodeos were canceled last year due to the public health crisis, the 2020 rodeo queen will be serving for this upcoming season.

Makenna Hohlbein is this year’s rodeo queen.

“Normally, a queen would travel, maybe once every two to three months to a rodeo it just kind of depends on the schedule whereas last year our schedule was completely canceled because all of the rodeos were canceled. So this year I'm hoping that we will be doing the normal amount of traveling which it can get very busy.”

Her job is to interact with the spectators and represent the team when traveling to different rodeos across the state.

Her right-hand woman is Rosie the horse and these two have been together since Hohlbein was in the 4H program.

“She is a runner, she actually is an ex-racehorse so she used to be out there running as fast as she could, you know on the track. And when she came off she still loves to run so this is like the perfect environment for her.”

The rodeo queen shares her most important goal with me.

“My goal is to just make one person smile at least you know, I want our rodeo here to just really heal this community from such a horrible pandemic you know that has wiped out so many small businesses, you know it's put people out of work and so I just hope that this is a distraction from all of that and you know we can you know to start the healing process and start to regrow again.”