PUEBLO, Colo. – When it launched in 2022, the PBR Camping World Team Series changed just about everything about the PBR landscape.
The Unleash The Beast season shifted, the summer break was altered, and suddenly, bull riders had team obligations when they would typically be on their own to choose their summer slate.
Chad Berger knew he had to do something.
The 12-time PBR Stock Contractor of the Year lives in Mandan, North Dakota, and helps put on several Challenger Series events throughout the area during the summer. One of them – the Dakota Community Bank & Trust PBR Bull Riding Challenge – is Berger’s own event.
“With this new Teams thing, that’s when we decided we needed to do something, because it was just too much stuff for them guys to do otherwise, and we just thought we had to make something exciting to entice them to come,” Berger said. “Otherwise, we would have riders that couldn’t ride nothing. We needed to step up our game.”
He and Adam Libby, an event producer, put their heads together.
In the summer of 2022, the King of the North Showdown series was born.
The series spans 10 Challenger Series events in Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota between April and October, with the bulk of the action in June and July. A rider’s six best finishes at those events are tallied (any additional placements are dropped), and whoever does the best is crowned King of the North.
The winner receives a $100,000 bonus, while the second-place finisher receives a $25,000 bonus, and the third-place finisher receives a CF Moto side-by-side.
“They’re all very high-caliber events,” Berger adds. “There’s a lot of money at all of them – Bismarck’s $40,000, Belcourt is $30,000, Thief River Falls is $40,000, Deadwood’s $30,000. So not only can you win $100,000, all the events, you can win a lot of money at them.”
The series was an instant hit. Just months after winning the 2022 PBR World Championship, Daylon Swearingen was crowned the first King of the North.
“Without King of the North, we would’ve probably never seen Daylon Swearingen at all, right?” Berger said. “And last year, it was Alan de Souza. So that’s the kind of caliber guys we’re getting. We’re talking a World Champion winning it the first year, and Alan de Souza was Top 10 this year.”
Berger’s event in Bismarck has always been a popular summer stop for the top riders, and fans have always come out in droves to watch it. But King of the North has given it an added boost in a more crowded PBR landscape.
“We were worried about losing numbers if we didn’t have the caliber of riders that we need, that our crowd is used to seeing,” Berger said. “If they said, ‘Well, ain’t how it used to be…’ – we didn’t want to lose fans over it. It just looked to me like we had to do something, or we were going to be in trouble. And it’s worked.
“Andrew Alvidrez – guys like that. There’s enough bull ridings right around Texas. They don’t need to come all the way north to Montana and North Dakota. Wyatt Rogers – he hung out here all week. Guys that you see on the tour are hanging out and going to these events, which I just don’t believe they’d be here if it weren’t for what we’re doing.”
Indeed, if you look at the draw for a King of the North event or peruse the standings, it doesn’t look too different from the draw of an Unleash The Beast event.
This past weekend, Kyler Oliver went 2-for-2 to win the Sky Dancer PBR, presented by Sky Dancer Casino & Resort, in Belcourt, North Dakota, to take the lead in the overall standings. Julio Cesar Marques, who just finished his rookie UTB season ranked No. 18, is fourth, followed by Elizmar Jeremias, Ednelio Almeida, Elijah Monnett and Bob Mitchell. Also in the mix are indeed Alvidrez and Rogers, in addition to Kaiden Loud, Mauricio Moreira, Mason Taylor, Marcus Mast, Briggs Madsen and Koltin Hevalow.
“We had a lot of those Teams guys coming last year that would miss their team event to come to one of our events,” Berger said. “So it was just something that needed to be created for us to be successful up here. Otherwise, we would have riders that couldn’t ride nothing. We needed to step up our game.”
Most recently, Jeremias went 2-for-2 to win the Binford PBR in Binford, North Dakota, leaving just three events remaining on the King of the North calendar: Thief River PBR (Thief River Falls, Minnesota) on July 19-20, Bull Thing PBR (Eureka, Montana) on Aug. 24, and the Minot Y’s Men PBR (Minot, North Dakota) on Oct. 25-26.
One thing about Berger is that he will make all his events memorable.
“I’ve experimented a lot,” Berger said. “I always like to have big things. One year here in Bismarck, I had a match with all the past and present World Champions. We did a five-team, three-man team thing here one year, and we had seven 90-point rides in the short go. So I like to do big things, and King of the North makes me proud because I like to see these young kids do well. Kaiden Loud, he won Bismarck here and left with $12,000 the other day. It’s exciting for me, and it makes me feel good that we can bring this caliber of events to the upper Midwest, where I’m from.
“It’s important to me to bring top-caliber events. If I put my name on it, I want it to be top caliber, and in order to make it top caliber, I think we had to create the King of the North.”
Photo courtesy of Josh Homer/Bull Stock Media
