By Ted Harbin / Photo Courtesy of Laura Storey (CFD)

This has been a July to remember for breakaway roper Cheyanne McCartney, and her bank account is the beneficiary.

So is her place in the WPRA world standings. She stands alone at the top and has just been piling it on. Of course, that’s going to happen when one person wins nearly $100,000 in a month.

She kicked off the 31 days on the calendar with a big finish at the Calgary Stampede, where she won two rounds and was runner-up in the third in her set. She spent three days south of the border to rope at other lucrative rodeos before returning to Alberta to win the championship on Showdown Sunday. In all, she left town with $69,500.

That’s what catapulted her to the top of the mountain, but she wasn’t done. She picked up a few thousand more at a handful of rodeos before converging on Cheyenne (Wyoming) Frontier Days. During Sunday’s championship round, she stopped the clock in 4.3 seconds to bookend her month with big victories. All told, she added $16,864 in Wyoming, the bulk of which came from the $11,915 she earned on the final day.

In doing the math, more than $86,000 of McCartney’s earnings came from two of the most prestigious rodeos in the game, Cheyenne and Calgary. She was the high-money winner at Frontier Days, which is saying something.

The former Cheyanne Guillory, she was raised just north of Cajun Country in Lecompte, Louisiana, where she was a star softball player who played the game in college. By the time she graduated, breakaway roping had taken off, so she joined the fray.

She made the National Finals Breakaway Roping the first time in 2021, then won its average championship two years later. After missing out on the finale in 2024, she returned to it last year.

She’s taking her hitting streak straight to a fifth breakaway finals qualification this year. McCartney finished the 2025 season ninth in the world standings with $138,499. She’s already beaten that mark this year, and there are more than two months left before the regular season comes to a close.

Just as base hits matter in softball, catching checks at a lot of rodeos will pay dividends, but there’s nothing better than the home-run ball. McCartney is connecting with power, and the runs are turning into dollars.