Nick Morrison

Nick Morrison grew up on a large centennial family ranch in Wyoming. His family moved to South Dakota when his dad entered the ministry and began pastoring a church on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Even though his dad was now a Pastor they continued ranching in South Dakota, raising beef cattle and training colts along with raising bucking bulls and bucking horses for the rodeo circuit.  

Nick started riding steers when he was 9 years old and immediately grew a passion for riding bulls. By 19 years old Nick was riding bulls professionally full time on the PBR Tour.  But his professional career was marred with one injury after another. He broke C-2 in his neck his rookie year. After 10 months of recovery and rehab he came back only to have a freak accident where a bull flipped over onto him breaking T-10 and T-11 in his back. The next year he rode through shoulder dislocations and a mounting concussion problem that had started for him in High School.  Then in 2004, at Nick's first PBR back after rehabbing from surgery on his right shoulder, Nick had another fluke accident in the arena that caused a career ending injury to his left shoulder. His bull riding career, something he planned on doing until he was in his late 30's, was over at only 21 years old. 

Looking back this was a blessing in disguise because the concussion issue, something that wasn't very focused on in the late 1990's and early 2000's, would prove to be the most serious injury from his career. In 2008 Nick started having issues with passing out, nose bleeds, and confusion to the point of not knowing where he was or even who he was. After over a year of tests it was determined that Nick had a serious traumatic brain injury to the front right lobe of his brain caused by dozens of concussions.

In 2005 Nick moved to Texas to take over as the Worship Leader and Youth Pastor at a growing church in Montgomery, TX: Lone Star Cowboy Church (LSCC). Nick eventually led Crossfire Youth Ministries, based out of LSCC, that grew to not only hundreds of teenagers in attendance every week at the Youth Service at LSCC, but also satelliting their service to over 30 locations around the Midwest.  In 2012 the stress and hours that went with running Crossfire were starting to make the brain injury have more issues. So Nick stepped down from his position and moved to Dayton, TX to take an administrative position as the Director of Ministries at Dayton Christian Center.

Throughout this entire time Nick had been traveling and speaking, both as a Christian Speaker and as a Motivational Speaker bringing awareness to concussion issues. In January of 2020, while during a Fast, Nick felt God leading him to switch gears and start doing Stand Up Comedy instead. As much as Nick loves it now, he will tell you it was definitely not something he was excited about transitioning into doing.  One week after his first Open Mic the entire country shut down due to Covid; so his new career had to be put on hold.  As Nick puts it, "You know God. If my first Open Mic was that bad and you were having second thoughts; there are a lot better ways of telling me."

As Nick kept passing out over the years, and incurring more concussions from the falls due to passing out, the brain injury kept getting worse. In late 2020, while outside doing some yard work, Nick sustained a minor brain stroke, losing all speech abilities along with other issues. This was particularly a big problem because how can someone do Comedy if they can't speak? 

Nick's motto has always been “Work like it depends on me. Pray like it depends on God.”  So through vigorous rehab and lots of prayer Nick recovered almost fully. This motivated Nick to pursue comedy with more intention than he planned before. Since 2021 Nick has slowly been building his Comedy career, with it really taking off in 2022.  Nick uses his opportunities on stage and in the public to not only bring awareness to Concussion issues, but to also bring motivation to those around him to not give up no matter what obstacles get in the way.