Shotgun team takes third DIII victory at SCTP shoot

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Shotgun team takes third DIII victory at SCTP shoot

During spring break the Hillsdale College shotgun team garnered an immense victory at the Scholastic Clay Target Program Nationals tournament from March 18-20.  

The Chargers won the high overall award for the Division III category, with a score of 2775/3000 targets, and finished with several other individual awards, the highest being sophomore Ida Brown with a third-place finish as the highest overall female. 

Hillsdale shot the highest score of any division for Bunker Trap, with freshman Sam Blevins scoring the highest of any competitor. Brown won the ladies division and freshman Jessica Strasser placed third amongst all female athletes.  

Despite practicing the discipline the least, the Chargers performed very well in the American Skeet portion of the competition with freshman Stuart Brown and sophomore Tommy Rodgers both breaking 99/100 on the second day of the event. While the team score for the event was 973/1000, top individual scores came from William Stuart with 197/200, Brown with 195/200, and junior Anthony LaMacchia with 194/200.  

Under normal circumstances, SCTP Nationals is held in October, but due to COVID-19, it was postponed to the spring. Now, the nationals competition is the week before the Association of Colleges Union International competition, or ACUI nationals, which is held in San Antonio, Texas, every spring.

“This shoot was the ultimate warm up for going down to Texas,” head coach Jordan Hintz said. “Because it’s so close, hopefully the people that shot well can keep the momentum going, and for people who didn’t perform to their highest level, they’ve had this under their belt now and have a much better idea of what it’s going to take to perform the way they’d like.” 

Until this point, the team has had non-fixed squads for competitions, but at SCTP it practiced in the exact squad that would be competing together in Texas.  

“At least with my squad I feel like I was really able to connect with them a lot more,” Brown said.  

Comparing old statistics from the previous ACUI shoot to the latest SCTP shoot, Hintz said he has great confidence in the team’s potential. 

“The team shot considerably better here than in the 2019 ACUI and better than the two teams that beat us then,” Hintz said. “In my time as the coach, I have far more confidence in this group than even the group last year and even the year before.”

The team is now heading to Texas to compete in the ACUI nationals on March 25 for the final competition of the season.