Crowds Travel From Across The Country For SLTC Rodeo and Graduation

Mark Bish was calm. He was focused. He had trained the last 15 weeks for this. Intensively, for full days, in the elements. 

He pulled his gloves tighter and adjusted his hard hat. He scanned the crowd. He found his family against the roping that outlined the training grounds, a series of several dozen wooden electrical poles that he had spent the last four months climbing up and down. They were smiling. They had come all the way from New Jersey for this, and they were excited. 

Then, after a moment, the announcer came over the PA, and Bish was climbing.

He joined several hundred members of his cohort and several thousand of their friends and family in the Southeast Lineman Training Center’s annual rodeo on , a fast-moving showcase held ahead of the class graduation.

“Our students have went through a 15-week program to get them ready to go into the apprentice field of electrical line worker, and this is like the culmination event,” said Curtis Stewart, training director at SLTC. “We pair them up in teams. They get to compete at various things that are line worker related, show off their skill set to friends and family while having a little healthy competition.”

The rodeo serves as the capstone event for students completing the school’s Electrical Lineworker Program, turning months of training into a public test. Teams rotate through challenges designed to mirror real-world conditions, from timed equipment work to rescue scenarios high above the ground.

The crowd surrounding those events has grown into something much larger than a typical school gathering.

“It humbles us to know that we get students from all over the country,” Stewart said. “And to have this many people, thousands of people, show up to support these young men and women that choose to do this for a career, means the world to us.”

That national draw, Stewart said, has been built largely through word of mouth, as graduates move into the workforce and point others back to the program.

“Word of mouth advertising is our 100% best,” he said. “You have a young man or woman that comes from, let’s just say, New York, comes down here, they hear about our training, they get here, they get trained, they go home, they get that dream job, they tell their buddy about it, and that’s just how it all started, really.”

SLTC’s Electrical Lineworker Program lasts 15 weeks and is designed to prepare students for careers in the electrical utility industry. The school has more than 25 years of experience, more than 30 full-time instructors and more than 100 acres of training grounds across its campuses.

For staff, the rodeo and graduation mark the end of a process that begins months earlier. This rodeo was especially special as it featured the biggest graduation class–at 365 students–in the history of the training center.

“Amazing,” said Veronica Forrester, an admissions representative and dual coordinator. “It kind of makes me. I feel like a proud mom or something when they come here and finish. It’s really cool.”

This year’s rodeo featured events such as the Grunt Bag Pull, Pole-Top Rescue, Insulator Change-Out and Egg Climb, alongside food trucks and vendors. Graduation for Class 79 was scheduled for the following day at the Chattanooga Convention Center.

For Bish, the moment was about more than the climb itself.

“It means a lot, honestly,” he said. “It’s pretty cool. I get to climb in front of my family and show them all the hard work that I put in, and show them that I came here to do what I came here to do.”

He said the program pushed him, but prepared him for what comes next.

“It was pretty hard,” Bish said. “I just tried to learn everything I could while I was here, so that it makes me better when I start my career.”