Story by Ruth Nicolaus
Because of his parents, Scott and Jenee Holub, and his granddad, George Rachau, Dillin Holub is involved in the sport he loves: rodeo.
Born in 1996 in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, Dillin’s older brother, Dustin, was roping calves, which piqued Dillin’s interest. He wanted a horse “badly,” he remembers, and begged his parents, who lived on a farm but never competed in rodeo.
It was his grandfather, George, who helped get the barn built, and Dillin got his horse.
In junior high, Dillin team roped and chute dogged, and by the end of middle school, he was watching videos of steer wrestling, and decided to add that to his repertoire. In high school rodeo, he rode bareback horses and bulls, team roped and steer wrestled, but after attending a dozen of veteran bulldogger Greg Bennett’s clinics, that became his best event.
In the Pennsylvania High School Rodeo Association, Dillin was the steer wrestling champion his senior year (2015), and reserve champion the previous year.
After attending Ranger (Texas) College for a year, he came home and began driving truck. He has done some over-the-road trucking but now hauls tankers and is home every night.
An American Pro Rodeo Association member since 2015, when he was eighteen years old, he rodeos across Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Vermont, West Virginia, and Maryland, competing at upwards of fifty rodeos a year.
Dillin’s main steer wrestling horse is a nineteen-year-old paint named Chief. Purchased as a team roping horse, Chief made his first steer wrestling run at a high school rodeo. On his first run, “he put me in the spot I needed to be.” Dillin went on to win his high school state title aboard Chief.
Chief “has the heart” to steer wrestle, he said.
His backup horse is Annie, a fourteen-year-old dun mare who he purchased two years ago. A former barrel horse, Annie “has the speed behind her and the heart to compete.”
Chief works best for the bigger pens; Annie works best in the smaller pens.
He and his wife Mallory, an APRA barrel racer, married last year and have a son, Brooks, who was born in April.
In his spare time, he likes to hunt coyotes and trail ride with his wife.
In 2015, Dillin was the APRA Rookie of the Year; he also qualified for the American Finals Rodeo that year.
He finished the 2021 season as the seventh-best APRA steer wrestler. One of his favorite parts of rodeo is the people he’s met, from Australia to Canada and all over the nation.
