There are performances that win tournaments. And then there are performances that redefine what winning looks like. At the 44th NFAA Indoor National Championships in Louisville, Kentucky, Paige Pearce (USA) delivered the latter — shooting a flawless 600 points with a perfect 120 Xs across her two days of competition in the Professional Female Freestyle division, claiming the national title in the most dominant fashion possible and defending the crown she had won in exactly the same fashion the year before.
Not one arrow outside the X-ring. Not a single dropped point. Twice in a row. At the biggest NFAA indoor event of the year. There are very few compound archers — male or female — who have ever delivered back-to-back 600/120X performances at any national championship. Paige Pearce did it at Louisville, in front of a 1,500-strong field, against the best compound women's field that the NFAA Indoor Nationals has ever assembled.
The Numbers
Professionals at the NFAA Indoor Nationals shoot the iconic blue and white 5-spot target face at 20 yards — 60 arrows per day over two days, for a maximum total of 600 points and 120 Xs. The X is the inner ring of each of the three circular spots; hitting it scores 10 and registers an X, used for tiebreaking. Any arrow outside the X but inside the outer blue ring also scores 10 but does not count as an X.
- Day 1 score: 300 / 60X — a perfect day, every arrow in the X-ring
- Day 2 score: 300 / 60X — another perfect day, every arrow in the X-ring
- Combined total: 600 points, 120 Xs
- Result: 1st place, Professional Female Freestyle — no shoot-off required
Unlike the men's division, where 19 other archers also shot 600/120X and a shoot-off was required to separate them, Pearce's perfect 600/120X was enough to win the women's title outright. No tiebreak. No closest-to-the-pin drama. Just a flawless, wire-to-wire performance that placed her entirely beyond the reach of the field across both days.
Tanja Gellenthien (Denmark) — the 2023 Vegas Shoot champion and a two-time Vegas winner — finished second behind Pearce, with Alexis Ruiz (USA) taking third.
Who Is Paige Pearce?
Paige Pearce, from the United States, is one of the most decorated compound women's archers in American archery history and a perennial fixture in the top five of the world compound women's rankings. A Hoyt-sponsored professional and multiple Hyundai Archery World Cup winner, Pearce has been competing at the elite level since her teenage years — making the transition from youth prodigy to dominant professional with a consistency of results that few compound archers of any gender can match.
Her indoor speciality is well-established. At the 2023 Vegas Shoot — the year before her Louisville double — she shot a perfect 900 to make the compound women's shootdown, only losing to Gellenthien when a nine on her final arrow of the second end gave the Dane the opening to win. The fact that Pearce responded to that heartbreak by winning back-to-back NFAA Indoor National Championships — in 2023 and again in 2024, both with 600/120X — speaks to the character and mental resilience that defines her as an athlete.
Off the range, Pearce has long been one of archery's most visible ambassadors, active on social media and in advocacy for growing women's participation in the sport. She hosted a seminar at the 2023 Vegas Shoot titled "Form For Success Under Pressure" — a reflection of her reputation not just as a performer, but as a thinker about the mental architecture of elite compound archery. Her ability to turn the psychology of pressure performance into something teachable has made her one of the sport's most respected voices as well as one of its most decorated competitors.
The Back-to-Back Context
Winning the NFAA Indoor National Championship in the Professional Female Freestyle division once is a career achievement. Winning it with a perfect 600/120X — no dropped X, no dropped point — is a career highlight. Winning it twice in a row, both times with a perfect 600/120X, places Pearce's Louisville performances in a category occupied by very few archers in the tournament's 44-year history.
The competition she overcame was not diminished. Gellenthien — her opponent in the Vegas Shoot shootdown just months earlier — finished second again. Alexis Ruiz, who went on in 2026 to top the compound women's qualification at the Merida IWS 500, was third. The top three women in Louisville in 2024 were three of the very best compound women archers in the world, and Pearce placed herself a class above all of them across both days.
Seminar: Form For Success Under Pressure
Beyond her competition results, one of Pearce's most meaningful contributions to the Louisville week was her public seminar — a session devoted to the mental skills and physical processes that allow an archer to perform under extreme competitive pressure. Pearce drew on her own experiences of high-stakes shootdowns, national championships, and international competitions to outline the specific routines and mental habits she uses to replicate practice performance on the competition line.
Her core message was one that her Louisville scorecard illustrated perfectly: the best preparation for pressure is making your competitive routine indistinguishable from your training routine. When every end looks the same — same anchor, same process, same breath — perfection becomes repeatable. Her 120-X weekend at Louisville was not luck. It was the execution of a system she had spent years building and refining, then teaching to others.
Key Moments
- 600 / 120X — every single one of 120 arrows in the X-ring across both days, with no tiebreak required to claim the title.
- Back-to-back NFAA Indoor National Championships in 2023 and 2024, both with 600/120X — one of the most consistent championship streaks in the event's 44-year history.
- Gellenthien and Ruiz finished second and third respectively — confirming Pearce's dominance was achieved against a genuinely elite international field.
- Pearce's Louisville performance was the direct rebuttal to the heartbreak of the 2023 Vegas Shoot, where she had shot 900 only to lose to Gellenthien on the very last arrow of the shootdown — she channelled that near-miss into two straight national titles.
- Her seminar on pressure performance at the 2023 Vegas Shoot underlined a dimension of her archery career that sets her apart: not just a champion, but a communicator and educator of the mental side of the sport.
What It Means
For Paige Pearce, back-to-back 600/120X NFAA Indoor National titles in 2023 and 2024 cement her as the defining compound women's archer of the modern American indoor era. No one else in the Professional Female Freestyle division has matched her consistency at Louisville — not across multiple events, not at the same level of perfection.
For the NFAA Indoor Nationals, Pearce's presence and her standard of performance have become a benchmark — the score that every compound woman arriving in Louisville is trying to match. When you are the person who others are trying to beat, and when beating you requires shooting 600/120X two days in a row, you are not just a national champion. You are the standard.