At the 2025 Cinch RSNC World Finals, four standout ranch sorters—Kody Ward, Aubree Coker, Kara Doornink and Nicki Fuller—won their divisions in the Holiday Auto Group Challenge of the Champions, an elite event featuring the best of the best. The class showcases the highest-earning ranch sorters from the season, with only the top five riders from each division—Open, Amateur, Novice and Rookie—invited to compete. A sudden-death, round-robin format means each contestant rides with every other in their division. Final standings are then based on the total number of cattle sorted in the least amount of time
Aubree Coker, of Palm City, Florida, narrowly secured her place in the Challenge of the Champions after a late-season points shake-up.
“I was so excited,” Coker said of learning she’d made the cut. “We were sitting at the cattle barn, and I got a voicemail from RSNC, and it said something about the Challenge of the Champions … I just started jumping up and down, embarrassing myself in front of all the professional cow buyers and sellers.”
In April, Coker won an astounding $12,092 thanks to sweeping the top four spots in the Professional’s Choice #9 Gold Shootout at the Cinch RSNC Northeast Regional Super Sort. The success came with an immediate ratings bump, but she went into the Finals strong with $34,728.
On Challenge of the Champions night, No. 10 Coker made her first of four runs with Kim Christy wearing #8 on her back number. Coker made some impressive stops at the gate, and the team kicked off their class with three head.
“Three cows were better than nothing in my head, and so we just kept rolling after that,” Coker said.
In both her second run with No. 4 Sadey Rasmussen and the third run with No. 2 Kris Doornink, the teams sorted eight head. In her final run, she and No. 5 Sidney Rasmussen had a clear game plan.
“We walked in and she’s like, ‘Let’s just get a clean run,’” Coker said, who also knew “that we had to have 10. So I was like, ‘Well, we’ll get a clean run and hopefully 10.’ That was the goal.”
Ultimately, she and Sidney tied with 29 head, but Coker edged to the top of the leaderboard with fewer seconds clocked across her runs.
“I just felt absolutely honored to be riding against the people that I was,” Coker concluded. “They’re the best in the country, and we’ve all been competing against each other this whole year. It has been amazing to ride with them and against them, and just everybody’s always cheering each other on. They’re just absolutely amazing riders, and I was just honored to be in there with them.”
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of The Ranch Sorter, featuring World Champion stories, event recaps, regional results, and more.
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