The Hillsdale College shotgun team is heading to San Antonio, Texas, from March 25 to April 3 for the 2016 Association of College Unions International Collegiate Clay Target Championships, where the team will compete to win their third consecutive D-III national championship, and fourth in five years.
“We expect to do well,” assistant coach Adam Burlew said. “Most of the team has been before, so they know what they’re getting into. There’s less fear of the unknown.”
The Hillsdale shooters have not let their success in shotgun competitions over the past five years keep them from focusing on winning again. Instead, they remain hard at work, focusing on continuing to improve their areas of weakness from last year’s competition.
“We’d like to do what we did last year, but not have the final totals be so close,” junior Kie Kababik said. “We performed well individually last year, which was good.”
Last year, the team edged out Schreiner University by eight targets, a margin Kababik and his teammates said they would like to widen this year.
“We were worried about them last year and we are this year, but we have many competitors and it’s mostly a matter of how much they’ve improved,” junior Jordan Hintz said.
The team labeled Schreiner their major competition, especially considering their close victory last year.
“We had a slow start last year. If we get more focused this time, we’ll be good,” sophomore Drew Lieske said. “We’ve been focusing on improving what we need to in order to make that happen.”
Hintz agreed, saying it’s easy to struggle on the first round, making it important to focus on starting strong.
The team has altered their practice structure to more accurately replicate their expected competition to help hone the mental focus they believe they will need during nationals. According to Burlew, the team has been shooting more rounds for score during practice, which allows them some level of control over conditions not always ideal during actual shoots.
“We have also loosened the practice structure to allow the shooters to focus on what they think they need to improve,” Burlew said.
At the D-III level, each team competing at nationals sends ten shooters who shoot in each event, including trap, skeet, wobble, and five-stand. The three best scores from each team in each event are then chosen for team’s score, which is then used to determine a team’s overall place.
