The Hillsdale College Action Shooting Sports Team, created last semester, went to its first national competition in Talladega, Alabama this past weekend.
“We did amazing in the sense that we started this in like September and then went to the national collegiate level to go participate,” freshman team member Elias McConnell said.
The Scholastic Action Shooting Program Collegiate Nationals was the team’s second competition so far. The Hillsdale team, which is a branch of the Hillsdale College Firearms Club, shot in two rifle events and one pistol event, which is the type of shooting they mainly focus on in their weekly practice.
Shooting instructor Adam Burlew said the members have improved over the past year.
“It was good just getting down there and seeing other teams, and seeing how the competition is run,” Burlew said. “It’s always tough the first year going down to something like this.”
The timed events involve four kinds of courses with five targets each. Participants shoot each course five times, and then their highest scores get cut off.
Three of the team’s four members, including McConnell and sophomore Jake Damec, are military veterans.
“When you’re out spending days on the range in the military, you’re pretty good at shooting pretty fast because you’re spending thousands and thousands of rounds,” Damec said. “And then you come to a civilian place, and you’re in school all day, and you lose that skill; it’s a perishable skill. So it was nice I guess to get time again out there on the range and to get re-acclimated to shooting on a weekly basis.”
McConnell said the team provides a good learning experience on the proper use of guns.
“Despite everything in the news and the way people feel about firearms, there were probably tens of thousand of rounds fired on probably 400 or 500 different guns without a single injury,” McConnell said. “So I think one of the things all of us really appreciate is just being able to educate people on how guns are dangerous—as are knives, as are vehicles, as is paper if you get a paper cut—it’s just about knowing how to be safe with said thing.”
Damec said his favorite part of the weekend was getting to shoot at the events and meet the other people involved.
“It’s fun hanging out with other people with similar interests across the country, just getting their background and hearing their story,” Damec said.
