COLUMBIA, S.C. — This weekend, crews with the Pendleton Whisky Velocity tour have been setting up shop at Colonial Life Arena for a night of professional bull riding.
They've brought in truckloads of dirt and set up pens for the bulls in just over a day.
"We came in yesterday morning, built the arena as you see it, we’re gonna tear it all down overnight and into tomorrow morning," said tour operations manager Kevin McCoy.
Being a crew member on a professional bull riding tour is a fast-paced life.
McCoy said every weekend they're "in and out, on to the next one," to set up arenas across the country for their bull riding competitions, which are for one night only.
Last year, that fast-paced work came to a halt during the pandemic. Once they were able to host events, they were for television only.
"Everyone that works live events will say it's just not the same without crowds," McCoy said. "It was kind of a bummer but at least we were able to still do events.”
But now, crews are leveling dirt and bulls are filing into their pens, before entertaining a large crowd.
"Now we’re full steam ahead," McCoy said excitedly. "We had to make up for a little bit of lost time when we weren’t able to do full capacity events and do an event every weekend, but now we're in a new city every week.”
With the full capacity events comes COVID-19 protocols that McCoy said they follow strictly.
"For our internal staff and all of our people, everyone gets COVID tested before the event. I took a COVID test yesterday morning, all of our crew have to do that before their first workday," he explained.
Vaccines are encouraged for employees but not required.
Mask rules for their events coincide with the venue or municipality's rules.
McCoy said, "if the house requires us to wear masks on the floor, backstage then we do it."
In this case, Colonial Life Arena is not currently requiring masks and neither is Columbia or South Carolina.
The tour heads to Massachusetts next weekend and finals will be this fall in Las Vegas.