Morgan Holmes and Monster Truk finally stood alone at the top.

Her Time Had Come 

After years of close calls and hard lessons, Morgan Holmes and Monster Truk finally stood alone at the top. 

By Dee Yates

Morgan Holmes was standing in the arena after the 2025 Art of the Cowgirl, another second-place finish behind her, and she turned to her mother and asked the question that had been eating at her all night. “Why can’t I get it done?” Rhonda Holmes didn’t offer analysis. She didn’t offer excuses. She looked at her daughter and said two words: “Keep going.” 

They kept going. And in Wickenburg, Arizona, in February of 2026, everything they had built finally came together. Morgan Holmes and her grullo gelding Monster Truk won the Kimes Ranch World’s Greatest Cowgirl title at the eighth annual Art of the Cowgirl, posting 447.5 points across steer stopping, herd work, and fence work to claim the championship that had been just out of reach for three straight years. 

It was a long time coming, but nobody who has watched this pair compete would say it was a surprise. Since the event’s first year, Morgan and Monster Truk have been among the most recognizable duos in the arena, not just for the way they ride, but for the way they show up. Always impeccably turned out, always coordinated, Morgan never in yellow and never with an untucked shirt, those are the rules her late grandmother Charlene Morgan instilled in her, and Morgan has carried them as non-negotiables ever since. You will not catch Monster Truk’s tail in a braid either. The standards are the standards. 

Morgan grew up at Triple J Ranch in Sarasota, Florida, where her parents Jay and Rhonda Holmes have trained and raised performance Quarter Horses since the late 1990s. Jay Holmes is a horseman’s horseman, a trainer who sharpened his skills at the King Ranch in Texas before eventually making his mark in Florida, where he became a founding member of the Gulf Coast Cow Horse Association. Morgan grew up in that environment, absorbing her father’s coaching from the time she was old enough to sit and listen while he worked with other riders. She learned not just how to ride, but how to think. 

She took that foundation to Lubbock, where she studied Agricultural Communications at Texas Tech University. The move to Texas did more than earn her a degree. It put her inside one of the most competitive performance horse communities in the country, surrounded by horsemen and horsewomen who raised the standard of everything she thought she knew. “The level of competition here pushes you every day,” she said. “I took everything my dad taught me and elevated it by being surrounded by some of the best horsemen and horsewomen in the world. Iron sharpens iron.” 

Monster Truk was not supposed to be a show horse. He was foaled in 2016 at Triple J Ranch and made his presence known within his first few hours on the ground, plowing over three adults, including Rhonda, before he had his legs fully under him. He earned his name immediately. A big, thick colt with a pedigree rooted in the horses that had shaped Jay Holmes’s career, he was assumed to be headed toward the rope pen someday. His sire’s mother was a mare Jay had brought from the King Ranch when he moved to Florida years earlier, one he’d purchased as a broodmare for two thousand dollars, and who had arrived with an unexpected yearling stud colt at her side, the horse that would eventually sire Monster Truk. His papers are a road map of the Holmes family’s entire history in the performance horse business. 

But Monster Truk had hard luck early. Sarcoid tumors marked his body as a young horse, leaving scars across his head and chest that he still carries today. He was left turned out, growing, and assumed to be a using horse rather than a show pen horse. Then COVID hit during his four-year-old year, and Morgan happened to be home in Florida when the world shut down. One morning her dad asked what horse she was working on, and something shifted. She decided it was time to make Monster Truk her project. 

“I don’t claim to have trained him,” she said. “He figured it out. I say I’m along for the ride and don’t claim to have taught him anything. Half the time I am loping him in a halter and enjoying him.” That may be modesty talking, but the results speak to a partnership that goes deeper than training. Morgan has been with this horse since he was hours old. She knows him in the way you can only know something you have raised and lived alongside. “I feel like I have a sixth sense about him,” she said. “I can tell when something isn’t right before any symptoms show up. I know him like the back of my hand.” 

Monster Truk carried Morgan to the NRCHA Non-Pro Hackamore World Championship in 2021. In 2023, as the youngest horse in the finals at the Art of the Cowgirl, he earned reserve champion in the World’s Greatest Horsewoman. He came back in 2024 and placed in the top three again. In 2025, Morgan needed just a 145 down the fence to take the title, and it slipped away, leaving her in second behind the formidable Kelsey Thomas and her mare Elvira, a duo that has dominated this competition as much as anyone in its history. 

Second place two years running. The question hanging in the air: when? 

The answer came on a Saturday in Wickenburg. After the reining phase of the 2026 finals, Morgan knew. “When he walked out of that pen, I knew if I just did my job the rest of the way, my horse could win it,” she said. “He has deserved that moment since the very first time I showed him there.” The herd work, as it often is for this pair, was their most difficult phase. But Monster Truk has always been a horse who answers when the pressure goes up. He did it in 2025, fighting back from ten points down after the herd work to deliver a second-place finish that was more clutch performance than consolation prize. He did it again in 2026, when it mattered most. 

Rhonda Holmes, who trained and showed Monster Truk’s sire and dam before watching her daughter show the offspring, summed up what it means to see this horse in the arena: “Over all the years, first showing them, breeding and raising, then showing the offspring, it is the ultimate for a breeder. Every time she walks into the arena, I thank God for that blessing she has that horse. Those two, they are made for each other.” 

Rhonda Holmes was there at Wickenburg, as she is every year, turning back for Morgan in the herd work and staying close through every phase of competition, keeping family and friends updated throughout. It was Rhonda who absorbed the hard question after the 2025 loss and answered it with two words that changed nothing and everything at once. When the title was secured, Morgan called her dad to share the news. Her grandmother Charlene, who had bragged on Monster Truk’s picture-perfect ears every time she saw a photo of him, was not there to see it in person. “I know she had the best seat in the house,” Morgan said. “I felt her with me the entire week.” 

Morgan’s middle name is Jolene, a combination of her two grandmothers’ names, Joyce and Charlene. The M and J are tattooed on her in a cursive heart. Some things you carry with you always. 

Morgan runs a straightforward conditioning program that prioritizes fitness over complexity. She lopes big circles, trots big circles, scores a few steers, works a couple cows, and trusts the horse she knows better than almost anyone. “My biggest focus is keeping him physically fit,” she said. “Finals day is demanding, and the last thing I want is for him to get tired.” Year after year, Monster Truk has come into the finals with more in the tank than he showed in the prelims. That is not an accident. 

For the young cowgirls who watched from the rail in Wickenburg, Morgan Holmes has a message that sounds like something a mother might say to a daughter after a hard night. Stay patient. Keep working. Never stop believing. “I hope they see that dreams really can come true,” she said. “I’ve dreamed about winning this event for a very long time.” 

She kept going. So did he. And in 2026, the dream caught up to both of them.