BBQ World Cup Qualifier: Nick Holman

Nick Holman likes to call his the little team from North Dakota, and he means it as a fact, not a boast. He and his wife Shannon run Burnt Trees BBQ out of Minot, up in the north central part of a state that hosts exactly one sanctioned barbecue contest a year. They do not cook full time. Nick works the oil field. Yet across a decade of long highway miles, this couple from the coldest corner of the map has out-cooked fields of eighty and ninety teams, and this spring they won their way to Las Vegas. In April of 2027, Burnt Trees will be one of roughly one hundred teams at the first BBQ World Cup, cooking for $1,000,000.

How barbecue found him

Barbecue was not in the blood. Growing up, Nick's family grilled on the deck, chicken and pork chops in the summer, nothing anyone would call barbecue. His mother did most of the cooking and never loved the grill. The first real spark came as a hand-me-down. When Nick was nineteen or twenty, his little sister bought him a cheap bullet smoker, the electric kind with no heat control, on or off and nothing in between. He kept that thing for years.

Back then he and Shannon were lake people. They had the camper and the boat and a standing spot at the water, and every weekend they went fishing. The move that would change everything was almost an afterthought: put a pork butt on the electric smoker in the morning, spend the day on the lake, and come home to cooked pork. Nick is the first to say it was barely barbecue. But one weekend a friend tasted that pork and called it the best he had ever had.

The tennis court in Glenburn

That friend did not let it go. Two months later he organized a rib contest twenty miles from the Holmans' house and called Nick to cook it. Nick said no. He had never cooked a rib in his life. It was too late, the friend told him. He had already signed Nick up and paid the entry fee.

So the Holmans loaded up a real smoker, a Traeger pellet grill, and drove to Glenburn, North Dakota, a town of maybe eight hundred people. The contest was a nine-team fundraiser held on a tennis court. Very backyard, very small town. They took third, and that was all it took. Nick describes the feeling the way half the sport does: you win a little trophy and suddenly you think you are the best in the world. The next weekend they went looking for another rib contest two towns over. They won that one.

For a few years the Holmans chased those local burns, learning as they went off YouTube and message boards and whatever books Nick could get his hands on. Nobody handed them a barbecue pedigree. They stumbled into the sport and then refused to leave it.

The little team from North Dakota

In 2018, friends who cooked alongside them, Owens BBQ and a cook named Marty, talked Nick into joining the Kansas City Barbeque Society and stepping up to the master series. His first professional contest was in Miles City, Montana. From there the schedule settled into seven to ten contests a year, a modest load by competition standards, with a heavier fourteen-contest push in 2024.

The setup is pure Burnt Trees. Nick cooks out of a four-horse trailer he converted himself, smoker mounted inside, living quarters up front. The rig even has a name, the Brisket Barn. When a North Dakota morning turns cold or wet or windy, he simply closes the doors and cooks. On a contest day his alarm goes off at 3:30, coffee in hand, pit lit by ten to four, meat on by five, no surprises.

There is a whole wardrobe of superstition on top of it. Nick wears a Star Wars shirt every cook day, the classic original trilogy only, and he owns fifteen or twenty of them. For awards the team pulls on baseball jerseys with their name on the back and red shoes, red sneakers or red flip-flops, without fail. He jokes that if they ever gave up the Burnt Trees name they would have to become Red Shoe Barbecue. The team motto fits the whole operation: put in the work to get lucky.

The work has paid off in the currency that matters to Nick, which is not a pile of trophies. Burnt Trees has banked four Grand Champion finishes in fifty career contests, a consistency ratio most cooks would trade a garage of gadgets for. In 2024 they drove down to Osage City, Kansas, for Smoke in the Spring, one of the biggest fields in the region, and won it the first year they ever entered. Nick has cooked the Jack Daniel's Invitational twice, the sport's most exclusive invitation, and drew the call to return again this year. He has taken category walks at the American Royal. What Nick is proudest of is simpler: a team from a place with no barbecue tradition can drive anywhere in the country, or up into Canada, and beat the best in the field.

Minnesota in May

The win that punched the ticket to Las Vegas is the one Nick still cannot quite believe. At Minnesota in May in St. Peter, a 77-team field, Burnt Trees got only two calls all day, one in ribs and one in pork. Nick did the math in his head the way every competitor does, and the math said they were not in it. As the announcer counted down the top ten, he turned to Shannon and told her that if their name did not come up soon, two calls or not, they were out. Third place was called. It was not them. He started apologizing to his wife, wishing he had cooked better.

Then came the walk to Grand Champion. The announcer was Phil Gorman, a man the Holmans know well, and on the lead-up he said the winner was friends from North Dakota. Nick looked at Shannon and asked, out loud, who else here is even from North Dakota. Then they called Burnt Trees. He was, in his own word, shocked. The team had talked itself all the way out of it, and that is exactly what made hearing their own name so good.

The people in the truck

Ask Nick who is in his corner and the first answer is sitting right next to him. Shannon Holman is his wife and his teammate, the person he will look at when they call Burnt Trees in Las Vegas. The two of them have turned all those highway miles into the best kind of quality time. Nick has said plainly that his dream cooking partner, alive or gone, is his wife, so the World Cup works out nicely.

Beyond the trailer there is a small circle he leans on. His father has always been the encouraging voice. There is Andy Schaff of Sugar Shack Barbecue over in Minnesota, a friend he met through the sport and now mostly talks to about everything but barbecue. There is Mike Earl up in Regina, Saskatchewan, a restaurant owner Nick trades calls with two or three times a week, who plans to be in Vegas that week to see it. Burnt Trees also carries one sponsor in its corner, the BBQ Superstore, run by a pair Nick calls Mark and Rich.

Life has thrown its own curveballs into the middle of all this. Three years ago, twenty-two years into a thirty-year mortgage, the Holmans lost their home to a fire. They rebuilt and bought a new house in their mid-forties, a turn Nick never planned for. He tells it without a trace of self-pity, the way he tells everything, as one more thing you handle before you get back on the road.

The road to Vegas

Nick is clear-eyed about what a million dollars is and is not. He would pay the taxes first, then pay off the new house and the truck, and maybe, he laughs, put new carpet in the hallway. It is not 1987, he points out, and a million dollars does not mean retirement. He would be back at the oil field the next week. What pulls at him is not the money so much as the room full of the best teams in the world, because Burnt Trees loves a big field. The bigger the contest, the more the whole thing ratchets up, and that is when Nick believes his team is at its sharpest.

When they call Burnt Trees to the BBQ World Cup stage next April, Nick already knows the plan. No fainting, no tears, or if there are tears they will not last long. He will look at Shannon, she will look at him, and it will be high fives and handshakes. The walk-up song is set, the same one they use every single time, Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress. And Nick will be dressed for it, red shoes on, because he intends to look good holding that check. The little team from North Dakota put in the work. Now they are one contest away from getting lucky.

Sources

Nick Holman, Road to 1 Million qualifier interview with Shannon Pruitt (BBQ World Cup). BWC Qualified Pitmasters Tracker (#36, Grand Champion, Minnesota in May). Minnesota in May 2026 KCBS results (Burnt Trees BBQ, Grand Champion, 77-team field, St. Peter, MN, May 2026). Tailgate Guys BBQ Podcast, Episode 355: Nick and Shannon Holman of Burnt Trees BBQ. BBQ United team profile, Burnt Trees BBQ. Hero photo: Nick Holman, Burnt Trees BBQ, BBQ World Cup pitmaster program.