After 17 Consecutive Qualifications to the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo, The Winningest Barrel Racer in Professional Rodeo Credits Her Success to Her Family and Her String of Horses

Lisa Lockhart qualified for her first Wrangler National Finals Rodeo (WNFR) in 2007, a feat that she has since repeated 16 consecutive times. For nearly two decades, she has remained a steadfast and consistent icon in the sport of barrel racing. Lockhart is the WPRA’s (Women’s Professional Rodeo Association) all-time winningest barrel racer with over $3.4 million in career earnings. She has thrice won The American, secured the Average title three times at the WNFR and finished first at so many major rodeos across the country that it’s hard to keep track. Cheyenne Frontier Days, Rodeo Austin, the Calgary Stampede, the Days of ’76 Rodeo and the Canadian Finals are just a sampling of the coveted event titles that she’s won. While most of her competitors find success on one horse, Lockhart has ridden and won on multiple equine superstars including Chisum, Rosa, Levee, Cutter and, of course, the infamous Louie. She has a knack for finding these special horses and helping them reach the most elite level in barrel racing. It’s this challenge that keeps her on the road year after year. “I love what I do,” she says. “I mean, I love horses and I love competing. It drives me. When one horse’s career is done, it's just such a challenge to see if I can make another great one.” This South Dakota mother of three is as humble as they come, downplaying the magnitude of her talent and always doing what’s best for the horse. What’s her secret? “There's no cookie cutter to this,” she replies. “Like anything in life, you just need common sense and work ethic. Thinking about the needs of others, including your horse, first and foremost. It’s not about you.” It’s this mindset that has catapulted her to the top and kept her there for 17 years and counting.

Small-Town Country Girl

Born in 1965, Lockhart grew up as the youngest of seven kids on a rural farm 25 miles from the nearest town of Circle, in northeastern Montana. With a population of about 600 today, this small farming community was the perfect place for a young girl to develop a love for horses. “I grew up on a pony. I just loved horses,” Lockhart recalls. “My mom would stick me on him out in the front yard, and I was happy!” From there, Lockhart’s oldest sister, Debbie, started teaching their horse rodeo events. “I just remember her pole bending through our trees we had planted all in a row,” she says. To this day, Lockhart considers Debbie her greatest hero because she trained that first horse with little to no resources. This same mount would later be passed down to Lockhart, and the duo would go on to win the Little Britches Pole Bending Championship and attend the National High School Rodeo Finals. With contestants from all over the United States riding the highest caliber horses, it’s pretty safe to say he was the only horse trained on a tree strip on the open plains of eastern Montana.

After high school, Lockhart attended Montana State University in Bozeman, where she would get her teaching credential in elementary education. Although she enjoyed teaching, her passion for horses kept pulling her out of the classroom. “I did some substitute teaching, and then I was a teacher for one year. After that, I decided I liked horsing around better,” she jokes. A few years after graduating, Lockhart met the love of her life, a tie-down roper, at a rodeo in Canada, and the two have been inseparable ever since. She remembers, “It wasn’t long thereafter that I met Grady, and we were married within a year and started a family.” With nearly 30 years of marriage under their belts, the couple is still as strong today as they were in those early years struggling to make a living rodeoing and training horses.

Family First

While all of Lockhart’s accolades speak volumes of her talent, her priority remains with her family. Foremost, she is a proud wife to Grady and mother to Alyssa, Thane and Cade. Luckily, she’s been able to have the best of both worlds for most of her career qualifying for the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo with far fewer rodeos than any of her competitors. “Bless Louie’s heart,” she says of her 2003 buckskin gelding. “He made life easy where I didn’t have to go so hard. The year I only traveled to 30 rodeos was pretty grand.” While some barrel racers compete at up to 100 rodeos in a season (and still don’t win enough money to be among the top 15 barrel racers), Lockhart is in a league of her own taking advantage of every competition she travels to.

When she’s not out on the rodeo trail, Lockhart can be found on the family ranch working cattle with her husband. They live 12 miles outside of Oelrichs, South Dakota — a small town founded by a cattle rancher in the southwestern corner of the state and made up of about 100 people. “We have all the important things: a gas station, post office, school, church and, of course, a rodeo arena,” Lockhart says. While their cattle operation of about 100 to 150 head keeps Grady busy most the year, he’s the first to push Lockhart to keep rodeoing. “If it wasn’t for his encouragement, I would have never done all this,” she admits. “I would have just stuck closer to home.” From early on, he recognized his wife’s potential and inspired her to reach for the stars.

Climbing The Ladder

While Lockhart never dreamed of qualifying for the WNFR, her hard work and passion for the horse sent her down a path to stardom. After getting married in 1994, she went to work training horses. “In those early years, we both rode a lot of outside horses, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It taught me so much,” Lockhart says. “I didn’t start out riding great horses. There were a lot of horses that if you could make them do their job, you were really getting something done.” During this time, Grady found the first horse that would give her a taste of success: a ranch horse named Shadow Class. Grady had ridden him on the Fulton Ranch, a neighboring ranch owned by the late Brian Fulton, a two-time WNFR qualifier and owner of A Streak of Fling, the 9 million dollar standout sire. The 5-year-old gelding, Shadow Class, was nicknamed Top Stick because he was lazy, but Grady felt something that he liked and he urged his wife to buy him. As it turned out, Grady was right. Lockhart bought the horse in July, and Top Stick took to it so well that she entered him in his first futurity just two months later. “That horse took me places that I had never been to competitively, including Houston and Cheyenne,” she says.

Aboard Top Stick, Lockhart’s name became more known in the arena, and she was invited to travel with Sharon Kobold, a three-time WNFR qualifier. “She didn’t set out to be my mentor, but I would say as far as teaching me how to care for my horse, she was,” Lockhart recalls. “She had a great rapport with her vet. I did with mine as well, but I didn’t know the questions to ask. Sharon taught me a lot in that respect.” Although Top Stick never made it to the big stage, due to some soundness issues, he had opened a door into a new way of life for Lockhart, and there was no turning back.

After retiring the gelding, she took a several- year hiatus from the sport to raise her family and find another talented mount to rodeo on. By 2005, she finally had two horses ready to compete at the professional level. The first was the grey gelding IR Peppys Breeze, or Sterling for short. Lockhart recalls: “I’d seen the horse years before and thought he had lots of potential. The gal had some trouble with him sometimes running up the fence on the first barrel. But, I thought it was worth the chance, and we absolutely gelled.” The second was Fast An Gold, a sorrel gelding, that Lockhart purchased from Tim and Kelly Bagnell after taking him in for training. They nicknamed the horse Chisum, after the 1970 western film starring John Wayne. “Chisum was my first love,” says Lockhart. “He was so easy to ride. I’d had him a few years, trained him, the kids could ride him and the next thing you know, he was doing great things. He was so cool.”

By 2006, Lockhart had qualified and won her first Canadian National Finals at the age of 41, making her the first American to hold the barrel racing title. It was at this point that Grady told her they needed to step it up the following year to see if she could qualify for the WNFR. “Yeah, let’s just load up with three kids and go,” Lockhart remembers. “Well, we did! We had to buy a bigger horse trailer, but that’s really where it all began.” Grady was a smart man. He knew his wife was destined for stardom, but neither could have imagined just how bright she would shine.

The Louie and Levee Show

In 2010, Lockhart brought to the stage a beautiful buckskin gelding with a perfectly correct turning style and consistent fast runs that made him an instant star. Spectators were bound to come to the fence to watch as the loudspeaker played the rock classic “Louie Louie,” by The Kingsmen, that announced his presence. An Oakie With Cash came to Lockhart similar to Chisum, brought to her by the Bagnells for training as a long 4-year-old. “Louie was supposed to be a high school rodeo horse for their daughter,” Lockhart says. “He had been trained as a reined cow horse, and he had all the tools and buttons to be great at whatever he wanted to be.” After spending some time with him, she realized how special he was. “It’s his desire to please. He was such an athlete and had the most try of any horse I had ever experienced before,” she explains with admiration. Louie would go on to become a two-time champion of The American and the WNFR Average along with winning countless professional rodeos across the nation. He was named the 2011 Horse with the Most Heart and, before his official retirement in 2020 at the age of 17, he had made 85 runs inside the Thomas & Mack Center, home of the WNFR, and amassed close to $2 million in earnings.

While the crowds were still aching to see Louie bust out of retirement, Lockhart brought a new grey gelding, named Promise Me Fame Guys, to the limelight in 2021. Even though Levee was the complete opposite in color, he reminded Lockhart’s followers of their favorite buckskin horse. “People joke about Levee being a little Louie in a grey costume,” she says. The funny thing was Lockhart felt the same. “There was something that drew me to Levee; he just feels a lot like Louie,” she explains. “It’s their desire to please, and their consistency of going out there and doing their job. There’s just really never any surprises with either of them. They are both smaller horses, a little bit more cow, their turns look alike, the body style, just kind of everything about them.” Levee soon followed in Louie’s footsteps winning The American, the Average at the WNFR and continuing to shine for Lockhart as she travels down the road still today. She concludes: “He is so fun, and it’s just a joy to be able to swing a leg over him. I know if I remotely do my job, he’s going to do his.”

Dr. Terry D. Swanson has been Lisa Lockhart's veterinarian for 30 years.

Dr. Terry D. Swanson has been Lisa Lockhart's veterinarian for 30 years.

Happy Horses Have Longer Careers

Lockhart learned early in her career that to be successful, she needed to provide the utmost care to her horses. This started a 30-year relationship with veterinarian Dr. Terry D. Swanson of Littleton Equine Medical Center in Colorado. This premier full-service equine referral hospital that Dr. Swanson built along with his two closest friends and colleagues, Drs. Charles D. Vail and G. Marvin Beeman, is known throughout the horse community as one of the best in the business. Lockhart has been using their services since she was a college freshman. Although she has used other veterinarians at the clinic, she shares a special relationship with Dr. Swanson that has been key to her success and consistency in the arena. “No matter what you do, longevity is key,” she says. “The longevity of my horses’ careers was built on my relationship with Dr. Swanson.” The DVM and team roper connected with Lockhart because he could see she cared as much for her horses’ well-being as he did. “Dr. Swanson says all the time that he trusts my intuition,” Lockhart says. With the diligent and caring veterinarian by her side, she has been able to keep her horses in impeccable shape well into their teenage years. “Chisum helped me competitively as an 18-year-old, and I only retired Louie at 17 because I wanted him to go out on top. He could have gone on much longer,” she says. In a sport that requires so much speed, stamina and grit, it is widely accepted that senior horses can’t perform as well as their younger competitors. However, Lockhart and Dr. Swanson have proven this theory wrong time and time again.

Another component to Lockhart’s winning recipe is providing her horses with a natural diet. “People ask me all the time how I keep my horses going so long,” she says. “My answer is a great veterinarian, great nutrition and their environment. Where we live, they get to be horses out on the ranch.” Since the early 2000s, part of that great nutrition has included Platinum Performance® formulas. Back in those days, Lockhart was just getting started in her career and trying to decipher all the different feed labels. That’s when she asked her veterinarian what he would use. “Dr. Swanson was at the forefront of me being a Platinum user,” she says. “Number one, it’s made by veterinarians and sold by veterinarians. How can you have any more faith in a product than that?” Furthermore, the wellness formula goes hand in hand with her program of feeding her horses a natural diet. She explains: “The overall wellness is just peace of mind knowing that someone else has done the research. I know I’m doing the best for my horses. Platinum Performance® CJ and Platinum Longevity® have been my longtime gotos as well as Osteon®, and then the Healthy Weight oil helps bind it all together.” She has used this combination with all of her horses to support their performance, well-being and durability to keep up with the challenging lifestyle that rodeo demands.

Long Live Cowgirls

Lisa Lockhart’s name will go down in history as one of the greatest barrel racers of all time, but her story isn’t finished. There’s still one ultimate title that has eluded her all these years: a World Championship in barrel racing. There’s no one more deserving of the title as she’s been the most consistent for 17 years piloting multiple different horses to the winner’s circle. It’s just a matter of time before it actually happens, and we can’t wait for that day to come. For now, she continues to do what she does best: riding, competing and looking for her next superstar to train.