After coming up just short in last year’s Precision Rifle Series Pro Series Finale, Austin Orgain led the pack this November with a score of 171.000. The competition was held at the NRA Whittington Center in Raton, New Mexico.
TWICE AS NICE
2020 PRS Open Division points winner Austin Orgain takes 2021 crown – and Finale that eluded him last year. PHOTOS BY AUSTIN ORGAIN
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n early November, the country’s top Precision Rifle Series shooters took part in the PRS Pro Series Finale, held at the NRA Whittington Center in Raton, New Mexico. Of the 200-plus competitors who participated in this year’s finale, several of them have been featured in previous issues of American Shooting Journal (including Morgun King, Allison Zane and Doug Koenig) – and all of them are elite, highly skilled shooters. This extremely competitive sphere means that winning any given match, let alone the finale, is a difficult task. Just ask Austin Orgain. In 2020, Orgain won the Open Division PRS points race, but came up just short in the finale match, earning
a hard-fought second place. This year, however, not only did Orgain win the overall points race again, he dominated the finale to take home the gold. The finale was a “field match,” says Orgain, which in PRS-speak means longer ranges and multiple shooting directions. “It consisted of 20 different stages and had a good balance of prone and positional shooting,” he adds. Though the match was arduous, Orgain attributes his victory “to being very consistent throughout the entire match, to my wind-reading abilities, and to all my gear running flawlessly.” The finale win was a long time coming for Orgain, who started shooting competitively as a kid, first in local BB
gun matches, and then moving on to pellet rifle and pistol competitions in 4H. During junior high and high school, he also began to shoot trap in 4H. “Once I got to college, I didn’t shoot very much, as I was on the collegiate rodeo team for Southwestern Oklahoma State University,” he explains. “After I graduated college and began a career, I wasn’t able to rodeo much and needed something to fill the competitive gap. This is when I picked up precision rifle shooting.” Orgain shot his first PRS match in 2016 and just a year later won the 2017 NRL Series Championship. In just six years of PRS competitions, Orgain has won 16 national-level matches, and of americanshootingjournal.com 23
