Ziadie crowned national shotgun champ again
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Chad Ziadie aims at a target during this year’s National Shotgun Championship at the Worthy Park Sugar Estate in Ewarton, St Catherine recently.
Chad Ziadie was crowned national shotgun champion for the third time after the scores were tallied at the end of the Jamaica Skeet Club’s National Shotgun Championship (NSC), which ran over several months at different venues across the island. It featured four different shooting disciplines, namely 5-Stand, FITASC, Super Sporting, and Sporting Clay.
Zaidie was 26 when he became the youngest shooter to win the National Shotgun Championship in 2022. He returned to the top of the sport in 2024 to be crowned champion for the second time. In 2025, he hovered near the top but ended the season as the A Class champion. While he was pleased with that, he never stopped aiming for the top. This year, he soared to the top spot for the third time to celebrate being the National Shotgun Champion once again.
He bagged 432 birds out of a possible 500 during the championship while scoring 94 in 5-Stand and 91 in FITASC to win those shooting disciplines. His Super Sporting score of 80 placed him in the top 10, and his 167 Sporting Clay score was good enough for the top six.
Ziadie was very happy with the win. “It feels good. Relief. I mean, the competition this year was very tight. As a matter of fact, Aliana [McMaster] charged back from 13 behind to only lose by three. It just shows you how tough the competition was this year.
“I faced some difficult challenges this weekend. My gun started to give me issues, and I had to actually switch back to my old gun, so it felt very good to finish on top, going through those difficulties this weekend,” said a pleased Ziadie.
Aliana McMaster scored 429 to bag the runner-up spot in the National Shotgun Championship. She also topped the Ladies category for the fourth time and won the Juniors category. For her, the secret to her performance is “the joy of the sport. I can’t say anything more than that. That’s the only reason I was able to keep my head focused and in the game and shooting well. It was just by coming out and having fun.”
President of the Jamaica Skeet Club Justin Samuda was pleased with the high quality of the competition as well as the record number of competitors. “So it was a really good turnout. We have had a lot of growth. The NSC, which usually didn’t attract the numbers that a club shoot would attract, this year we had 152 shooters that competed in some level of the NSC. That’s up from last year, which was about 130-something shooters, which last year was a record, so this year it’s an increase. So the club is growing and vibrant, and the committee remains on top of things, and so we go up from here.”
Samuda announced that a new class would be formed to consist of the top 15 gunners from this year’s NSC.
“We’re also forming a double A class now, and so there’s the top 15 overall from the 200 bird and from the NSC overall will form our double A class, to which Ali, Chad, all the super six (shooters) that you saw today will be part of that.”