Brandon Powell has spent 2026 making a habit of winning, and the NSCA Southeast Regional handed him the stiffest test of the run. He won it anyway.
The Remington shooter took the Main Event at Quail Creek Sporting Ranch in Okeechobee, Florida, beating a 706-shooter field from June 3-7 for his second regional championship in a row. He had already won the NSCA Northeast Regional this past May. He last took the Southeast in 2024. By his own read the targets at Quail Creek were the part worth talking about.
“Overall, I shot steady, and the event organizers did an excellent job of throwing the targets,” Powell said. “The targets were some of the hardest we shot all year and might be the most difficult we will shoot for the rest of the year.”
That degree of difficulty is more than bragging rights. The Regionals double as a proving ground for national team selection, and Powell did not lose sight of why the hard targets matter.
“These Regionals dictate and pick who is going to shoot for Team USA and represent our country when we compete overseas. Proving you can shoot hard targets is a big thing for the sport, and the difficulty level was definitely there,” he said.
Powell did not stop at the Main Event, which he won with a score of 179/200. He also took the Pro Challenge and posted strong finishes across the rest of the program.
His teammate Madison Sharpe matched him stride for stride on the women’s side. Sharpe was the Lady Champion and she did not win it narrowly with 159/200, two points ahead of runner-up Karen Miles. She took High Over All in the Lady Main Event, then added the Prelim and the Sporting Lite titles, a clean sweep of the events that mattered most in her field.
Team Remington filled in much of the rest of the leaderboard. Braxton Oliver won High Over All in the Super Sporting and the Sporting Lite Prelim. Todd Hitch finished runner-up in Five-Stand. In addition Michael Luongo placed third in a field of 364, won the Adio Cup and added podium finishes in the sub-gauge events.
The common thread under all of it was the shell. Team Remington shoots Remington Premier, the STS and Nitro lines that have been a fixture on competition stations for decades, and the company’s marketing chief Jason Nash read the weekend as a sign of what is coming internationally, expecting the domestic form to travel once his shooters head overseas.
Sporting clays rewards whoever can read a hard presentation and trust the gun and the load to handle the rest. At Quail Creek, the presentations were about as hard as they get, and two Remington shooters read them better than anyone else in the building.
See the full results of the 2026 NSCA Southeast Regional at the Score Chaser website.
Remington Premier STS and Premier Nitro are available at dealers nationwide and at remington.com.
Most Popular
