Every year at Camp Atterbury, Indiana, the world of competitive shooting compresses into a single, extraordinary showcase: the NRA World Shooting Championship, presented by Walther Arms. In 2025, the tournament returned to Camp Atterbury from September 30 through October 4, drawing a field of versatile competition shooters: pistol aces, rifle marksmen, clay-busting shotgunners and a rising generation from youth programs, all vying not only for more than $250,000 in cash and prizes, but for the fiercely coveted title of “NRA World Shooting Champion.”
The WSC is not a one-trick contest. It is, by design, a buffet of disciplines. Twelve distinct stages combine to stress everything from pinpoint precision to speed, from prone patience to dynamic movement. Disciplines include NRA America’s Rifle Challenge, Air Pistol, Sporting Clays, Cowboy Action, Precision Rifle Series, IDPA, USPSA and more. All competitors are split into Professional and Amateur divisions, each with dedicated prize tables. Not only that, all guns, ammunition and equipment are provided to competitors, making a level playing field.
In an era when specialization is easy and single-discipline stars are the norm, the WSC asks a bracing question: who can be best across the board? The 2025 iteration answered that question, crowning Nils Jonasson, who arrived as a near-miss the year before and left as the undisputed NRA World Shooting Champion.
“At the NRA World Shooting Championship, you can shoot alongside the best shooters in the world,” he said. “I am a multi-time USPSA, IPSC, IDPA and Three-Gun national champion. The best shooters in the world come and compete in this match. Even if you’re not at that level, to be able to watch them perform at the level they’re capable of is a real opportunity for a lot of people.”
Built To Humble (and Reveal) Champions
Walk the grounds at Camp Atterbury and you feel the architecture of the contest: stages borrowed from multiple competitive worlds, each with its own language of gear, time, rules and nerves. There are practical pistol stages, others that resemble what you would see at a precision rifle match, and still others where clay targets erupt like startled birds and test a shooter’s reaction and lead calculation. This kaleidoscope is the WSC’s genius—it resists simple prediction. Specialists are regularly humbled; the tournament rewards adaptability and the ability to reset mentally in the space between a missed clay and a laser-tight rifle group.
Another challenge is the fact that all guns and gear are provided to shooters. Yet gear is only part of the story. The 2025 championship reinforced that the great divider between podium finishers and the also-rans is often the capacity to discard any previous stage misery before stepping onto the next. In an event where one wandering zero or one missed lead can swing the balance, it’s important to have a solid mental game.
Winning here requires not only technical competence across platforms but also a rare mental elasticity. A competitor might move from a long-range precision position to a speed-driven shotgun relay in an hour; winners are the ones who treat each stage as a fresh puzzle rather than a continuation of the tally sheet in their head. The leaderboard, when the smoke cleared in 2025, was a portrait of such elasticity.
Jonasson’s Quiet Ascendancy
If the NRA World Shooting Championship is a decathlon for shooters, Nils Jonasson ran the perfect all-around meet. Having finished as runner-up in 2024, Jonasson returned to Camp Atterbury with experience that translated into relentless consistency. Across 12 scored stages, he rarely dipped below competitive form; where others had highs and crippling lows, Jonasson’s performance read like a metronome—steady and calibrated to win the long game.
On the final day he posted a winning total of 937.7056 match points to secure the title. The victory was both emphatic and telling; in a tournament that punishes one’s worst weaknesses, Jonasson had very few.
Beyond the numbers, Jonasson’s win is also a human story of incremental improvement. He treated the previous runner-up finish not as a failure but as a syllabus. At Camp Atterbury this year, that syllabus became a diploma. His comportment on the range, politely unflappable and analytically curious, reminded spectators that championships often favor temperament as much as talent.
“If you’re a pro and you come and shoot this match, check your ego at the door, because you’re going to do really good on some stages and really terrible on some others,” Jonasson said.
New Formats, New Pressure
2025 wasn’t merely a repeat of earlier years at the NRA World Shooting Championship. NRA staff introduced a Team Shoot-Off, a head-to-head sprint that tested not just individual skill but the capacity to function in a pressure-cooker team environment. The new format proved thrilling for spectators and competitors alike, and Jonasson’s team, including father-and-son duo Brian and Cole Shanholtz, took the inaugural Team Shoot-Off title, adding a cooperative chapter to an otherwise ruggedly individual competition.
Corporate partnerships also shaped the match, such as presenting sponsor Walther. Official stage sponsors and other supporters included Ruger, Taurus, Daniel Defense, CZ USA, Henry Repeating Arms, Fostech, LWRCI, Weatherby, KelTec, Mossberg, Marlin, SAR, Samson, White Flyer, Federal, Vortex and Practiscore. These partnerships matter: not only do they help underwrite prize pools, sponsors supply firearms, gear and logistical support that help make for a better competition.
Within the larger championship, the Ladies category is a focal point: a place where some of the shooting sport’s finest women competitors assert themselves against a deep field. Three-time Olympic biathlete Lanny Barnes defended her High Lady title in 2025, a performance that again showcased her adaptability across disciplines and underlined her status as one of the most consistent multi-discipline athletes in shooting sports today. Barnes finished 14th overall, and her back-to-back High Lady wins provide a through-line in recent WSC history: a reminder that excellence is neither accidental nor rare, but the product of relentless refinement.
“This match is incredibly challenging because you have to shoot 12 different disciplines from precision to run-and-gun to sporting clays and everything in between,” Barnes said. “I was thrilled to defend my title and take home the High Lady World Shooting Championship title.”
Prize Table and the Next Generation
Money matters less than the crown at Camp Atterbury (the NRA World Shooting Championships is, at heart, a bragging-rights event), but prize money and sponsor support do help sustain careers. The $25,000 top prize and a roster of stage-specific awards make this tournament worth the entry fee.
Perhaps more consequential than cash is the tournament’s investment in youth. Federal Ammunition, via partnerships with SSSF’s SCTP and SASP programs, covered entry fees for several Top Gun youth shooters this year, widening the pipeline and giving rising competitors exposure to multi-discipline formats early in their development. That’s a strategic move: the next generation learns that excellence in competition is not merely about a single discipline, but about cross-training and mental fortitude. The presence of young athletes, many still in high school, added a delightful unpredictability to the 2025 field and suggested a healthy future for the shooting sports.
Camp Atterbury: A Range That Works
Camp Atterbury’s layout and infrastructure were praised by competitors and organizers alike. A variety of range profiles allow match officials to create stages that felt authentic to different shooting disciplines. From precision rifle ranges to pistol bays and clay fields that ate misses with an unforgiving appetite, the venue allowed the NRA World Shooting Championship to be a true multi-sport celebration for the second consecutive year.
The NRA’s on-site administration, results reporting from our friends at Practiscore and social media coverage were also elevated in 2025, producing a slicker public-facing event to help grow spectator interest.
“This is a fantastic range,” Jonasson said about Camp Atterbury. “If people haven’t been here before, I highly recommend coming to Camp Atterbury, and NRA did a very good job administering the match.”
If there’s a theme to extract from this year’s championship it is that shooting sports are evolving away from silos. The all-discipline athlete is increasingly celebrated, and the NRA World Shooting Championship is the marquee event that rewards that versatility. Sponsorship dollars are following, not always evenly, but with growing appetite: manufacturers and ammo companies realize that the spectacle of a multi-discipline contest is the most persuasive way to show what their products do in varied, real-world-ish conditions. And youth initiatives hint at deeper pipelines and, possibly, a wider talent base in coming years.
Nils Jonasson’s 2025 victory is an impressive snapshot, but the competition keeps moving. As match formats iterate (like the Team Shoot-Off) and staff find ways to make the tournament more spectator-friendly, the NRA World Shooting Championship may begin to function more like a central festival in the shooting calendar: part championship, part demonstration, part talent incubator.
If you’re new to competitive shooting, the WSC is a masterclass in why versatility matters. If you care about the growth of the shooting sports, it’s a laboratory: sponsors, youth outreach, creative staging and broad media coverage all intersect here. And if you’re a fan of the human story, the slow alchemy by which practice and temperament convert into a title, Camp Atterbury delivered again in 2025.
For now, the 2025 NRA World Shooting Championship passes into the record books: Jonasson at the top, Barnes holding her High Lady crown, Team Shoot-Off squads showing what cooperation can look like under pressure and a cadre of young shooters catching a glimpse of what the summit feels like. The range is quiet for a moment, while competitors are already plotting next year’s puzzles.
2025 NRA World Shooting Championship Leaderboard
