WATL adds 23 venues, reports record 2025 season growth
WATL added 23 venues in 2025 as its circuit grew to 44 events and 202,630 matches, a sign axe throwing is becoming a sturdier sport.
Adding 23 new venues was more than a footprint play for the World Axe Throwing League. It showed a sport that is getting harder to ignore and harder to outrun, with more weekly leagues, more sanctioned events and a deeper pool of throwers pushing the standard higher.
WATL’s 2025 year-end ledger was built on scale. The league said it staged 44 events on its tournament circuit, including the World Axe Throwing Championships in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while logging 202,630 matches, 3,804,344 axes thrown and more than 5,000 throwers across leagues and sanctioned tournaments. It also calculated 94,778,400 feet walked between the line and the target, a number that captures how much repetition, travel and grind now sit underneath a sport once treated as a bar-room curiosity.
The headliners were familiar names to anyone tracking the top of the draw. Dylan Teets took the Hatchet title, Lucas Johnson won Big Axe, and Johnson teamed with Joe Devine to claim Duals. WATL also said the season produced 27 perfect games in Hatchet, 14 in Big Axe and 3 in Duals, a useful marker of how thin the margin remained even as the calendar expanded.
That expansion came with more structure. WATL said its 2025 league seasons ran 9-10 weeks, with a longer break between Season 1 and Season 2 to make room for the World Axe & Knife Throwing Championship, which took place April 3-6, 2025. The 9th World Axe Throwing Championship in Tulsa was officially wrapped in April 2026, another sign that the sport now lives on a more orderly annual cycle than it did when it was still fighting for mainstream recognition.
The league’s broader positioning matters as much as the raw totals. WATL says it was founded in 2017, operates across 20 countries and 300+ affiliated venues, and serves as the world’s premier governing body for axe throwing. It says it standardizes the sport through official rules, strict safety protocols and staff training, and its 2026 rulebook says a game is 10 throws and the highest score wins. Hatchet scoring also received updates, including revised outer bullseye and 5-ring positions and an outer killshot change to 7 points.
For axe throwing, the question is no longer whether it can draw a crowd. The better test is whether it can keep turning that crowd into a stable competitive ecosystem. WATL’s 2025 numbers suggest the answer is increasingly yes.
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