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If they get paid to ride, it is still a professional sporting event. PRCA is merely the sanctioning body. They don't have a monopoly on what is professional rodeo, and what isn't. An analogy would be professional football in the days before there was an NFL or AFL. If you get paid to play, whether or not it is your primary source of income, you're a professional. Amateurs don't get paid.

[off-topic rant]
These days, "amateur" is commonly used as a dismissive, because we assume that those who are getting paid to do what they do are better at it than those who don't. In a capitalistic sense, that may have some truth to it; but as a guitar player of 48 years, I can say with authority that for every brilliant professional guitarist, there are 20 more better than he is who never got discovered.

But back in the early days of modern olympic sports, it was the other way around. Amateur athletes were much admired because they performed their feats of excellence purely for the love of the sport and the accolades. "Professionals" were deemed to be uncouth and gross, because their motives for performing were deemed to be tainted by greed rather than by the love of excellence. After all, by the standard of the day, if they were really that good, they could compete against the world's best - who were unpaid - but they would have to do it as amateurs themselves. There was a social disconnect between excellence and remuneration - particularly in sports. And I think that not have been such a bad thing. Excellence in capitalistic ventures was still desirable, but that disconnect encouraged people to seek excellence in all things, regardless of whether they were being paid nothing, a small salary, or a huge fortune. Granted, the nitty-gritty of society didn't always reflect that; but that was the ideal that people clung to back then - even if they didn't meet that ideal in their own lives.

I think we lack that healthy disconnect today. The world is full of people who have less than high-paying jobs, who don't feel particularly motivated to do a good job because, in their minds, they aren't getting paid enough to do a good job. They want to see the returns before they put in the work. Their rationale is that, if they got paid better, they would work harder. The world is also full of people who attain high positions, perform poorly, lead their companies into insolvency, and then make off with obscenely huge compensation. The new paradigm is that the level of remuneration comes before the level of effort. This is "anti-darwinian," for lack of a better term.

But when we look at how the world really works, we see that it is the other way around. In the animal kingdom, excellence at what the animal is designed to do and be leads to survival of that animal and the passing on of its genetic contribution to the species. In the human world, hard work ought to lead to recognition, which in turn leads to advancement, which in turn leads to increased remuneration. The excellence should come before the reward, not after it.

I am a capitalist all the way to the bone, and I believe that athletes ought to get paid, if they want to be, and their pay should be commensurate with their performance, as determined by the marketplace. But there is a part of me that rebels when I hear the word "amateur" used to disparage somebody else - partly because the word still has its original meaning, even if people don't use it that way as much (imagine the use of the word "gay" pre-1970s compared to its use today), and partly because it is still admirable when someone chooses to do something for the love of the doing it, even if they're not getting paid for it. How many of us love to shoot, but we don't get paid to shoot? We are amateurs. Should the word be used to in any way mock or disparage you or me because we don't get paid for what we love to do, and try to do nonetheless to the best of our abilities because we love it?
[/off-topic rant]

Sorry for carrying on about it. It's just one of my personal quirks.