West Virginia’s rifle team has finished sixth and fourth respectively in the last two NCAA Championships, (the 2020 nationals were canceled due to COVID) and faced something of a rebuilding process this year, as the team had to meet the challenges of TCU, Kentucky and Alaska, among others, who have moved to the top of the heap in the college ranks.

That may come as a surprise to some who don’t follow the sport routinely and assume that WVU pockets championships with ease, but it has actually been five years since the Mountaineers last earned an NCAA title.

“The standard last year went up and up,” WVU head coach Jon Hammond noted. “Every record got broken last year, and not just once, but multiple teams broke them multiple times. And it was by those three teams — TCU, Kentucky and Alaska. They all broke or tied one of the different records at one time or another. That’s going to be a big challenge.”

None of that should be viewed as any sort of shortcoming or failure, of course. Programs go through cycles, and if your worst is a sixth-place finish in the country or a bit of a drought in bringing home first-place trophies, then you are still doing just fine. West Virginia, though, wants to do more.

“We had a really good run for a while, and teams had to figure out ways to get better and catch us,” Hammond said of West Virginia’s string of five national titles from 2013-17, which gave the Mountaineers 19 overall. “We’re kind of in that boat now, but we’ve continued to improve. Oftentimes, it’s a challenge as a coach to look and say, �The last two years we’ve finished sixth place and fourth place at NCAAs, but our season average has been getting better.’ And we’ve been shooting good scores, but other teams have been doing it faster. There is a cap; there is a perfect score. We’re getting closer and closer to that, so to find improvement gets harder and harder.”

Some of that improvement came with a second-place finish at last week’s WVU Fall Classic. Ordinarily, on-campus invitational tournaments in college sports are something of guaranteed wins for the home team, who stock the field with opponents that it should defeat.

Not so this event, though, as the Mountaineers invited their main competitors on the national scene — yes, TCU, Kentucky and Alaska — for a four-way showdown that defined the fall portion of the collegiate rifle schedule. The Mountaineers shot a 4733, which is their best of the season, to defeat Alaska (4725) and Kentucky (4705), while TCU went 3-0 with a score of 4737.

While WVU did fall just a bit short of a sweep, the results were encouraging. The Mountaineers posted their best score of the season, topping the previous high score of 4723, and also recorded their best score ever on the Bill McKenzie Rifle Range, which is a portable setup that was located in the WVU Shell Building for the Fall Classic but also can be sited in the WVU Coliseum for large events.

The McKenzie Rifle Range was first used in 2018, but for whatever reason, the Mountaineers have not shot their best scores at that home venue. With the 4733, which puts the Mountaineers back into the mix among the top squads in the nation, the team hopes to build momentum through the spring portion of the schedule for the NCAA qualifier, the Great American Rifle Conference (GARC) Championships and the NCAAs.

Coming into the Classic, there were some areas of concern for West Virginia. WVU’s high score of 4723 to that point was tied for only the 11th-best overall this year, and TCU and Alaska had a combined seven scores that were higher, including the top five nationally. The Horned Frogs have been consistently excellent, recording a 4758 and a 4753, while Alaska sported marks of 4753, 4751 and 4747. Mississippi and Kentucky also had a higher top score than anything the Mountaineers had shot to that date.

As always, results of individual matches have to be scrutinized past the final score. Rifle is something of a unique sport in the collegiate ranks in that top-tier competitors can miss some matches due to international competitions and qualifiers for those events. For example, WVU had three of its regular counters miss a match earlier this year, and Mary Tucker missed the dual match at Army on Nov. 12 as she competed for Team USA in the 2022 Continental America (CAT) Championships in Lima, Peru. That event also served as a qualifier for the 2024 Olympic Games, which will take place in Paris, France.

Kentucky’s Will Shaner, an Olympic gold medalist, did not compete for the Wildcats in the WVU Fall Classic, and he has been a counter just twice for UK this year.

Such absences can certainly lower team scores, but fortunately for WVU, there do not appear to be any scheduling conflicts that would keep any of its athletes from competing in the postseason in 2023.

Looking ahead, WVU has a pair of very winnable matches against Army and N.C. State to close out the fall season, but then it gets right back to the grind with a road trip to Alaska to open the spring slate on the weekend of Jan 13-14. The Mountaineers will face the Nanooks twice and also compete against Kentucky and Georgia Southern on the trip to the 49th state. Road trips to Ohio State and Kentucky also highlight the spring schedule, followed by another venture away from home for the NCAA Qualifier on Feb, 18 at VMI. The Mountaineers host the GARC Championships this year (Feb 25-26) prior to the NCAAs, which are at Akron, Ohio, on March 10-11.

This schedule was designed to give the Mountaineers as much seasoning and competitive heat as can be mustered in the regular season. With Kentucky and Mississippi also opponents in the GARC Championships, the Mountaineers will have no fewer than 13 Top Five matches on the schedule this year when it’s time to compete in the NCAAs.

“We have to shoot against all the best teams,” Hammond said. “We’re going to get challenged on our schedule. We (had) those three teams coming in for the Fall Classic, and then we’re going to go up to Alaska and compete against them up at their place for a couple of days. So, we’re going to see those teams a good bit. There are many other good teams out there as well, including Ole Miss.”

Without three of its top team members, West Virginia's rifle squad was still able to down Air Force and UTEP in a Saturday tri-match at the Air Force Academy's range in Colorado Springs, Colorado on Saturday. The wins pushed WVU to 4-0 on the season.

With Mary Tucker, Tal Engler and Natalie Perrin competing at the International Shooting Sports Federation's World Championships in Cairo, Egypt, the Mountaineers leaned on some depth in their roster to post a score of 4714, which was good enough to take wins over No. 2 Air Force (4682) and No. 19 UTEP (4564) on Saturday.

West Virginia posted a smallbore score of 2333, giving it a three-point lead over the Falcons in the first half of the competition. That was WVU's lowest smallbore score of the young season, but head coach Jon Hammond was realistic in assessing the results.

“There are definitely improvements we can make for tomorrow,” he said of West Virginia's showing in smallbore, which included counting scores by Malori Brown (589), Molly McGhin (583), Akihito Shimizu (581) and Verena Zaisberger (580). Becca Lamb's score of 578 was the discarded score in the discipline.

In air rifle, the Mountaineers were sharper, with Matt Sanchez' 597 leading a tight grouping of 595s from Shimizu and Zaisberger and a 594 from Lamb for a 2381 total. McGhin's 593, a very good mark, was the low score dropped from the team total of 2381. That bested Air Force's 2362 and UTEP's 2317.

"In air rifle, we came back with a much better performance as a team, some really consistent scores across the whole team, and overall, not a bad day," Hammond summed up. "There are things we can work on and improve, and it’s always nice to come back to the same range a second day and be able to correct some of those things.”

WVU will face the same two teams, again without the trio of Tucker, Engler and Perrin, on Sunday morning at 11 a.m. ET.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — During the summer, college student-athletes continue to work out in efforts to improve, but in most of those disciplines the focus is on helping the team win when the real contests begin as school gets back in session.

There are a few differences, though, especially in sports such as rifle, where the summer months feature some big competitions and events that are mostly conducted on an individual basis.

There are the Olympics, of course, which come around once every four years, but there are also various national and international competitions that are open to all, and are different in that there typically is not team scoring, as exists on the U.S. collegiate level.

West Virginia had five competitors in the recently completed 2022 U.S. Rifle National Championships, and the results were encouraging as the Mountaineers, with a veteran team, will try to build on their scores to get back to the top of the college heap in 2022-23.

“Summer is very individual, and people approach it differently,” explained WVU head coach Jon Hammond. “There are some that compete, and some that take time off over the summer to try to recharge a little bit. We don’t require our athletes to follow any particular path. Some trained here in Morgantown, and some went home to work out and recover.

“The U.S. Nationals were a nice halfway point between the end of last season and the start of the next, and I think most everyone will take the next three or four weeks off before we get back together for the start of the fall semester.

“I was pretty pleased with the results,” Hammond continued. “Mary (Tucker, who earned gold and silver medals in the junior women’s air rifle and smallbore relay, respectively) stood out, and did what she is capable are doing. We had some others make some finals, and we also had junior Olympic matches about two months after our season, and we had a couple that made finals there too. We are definitely happy with what we saw and with their results.”

With personal discipline such a huge part of competing in the sport, Hammond is committed to striking a balance between helping his competitors and listening to their needs.

“We stay in communication with them, and talk to them about what they are working on,” said the Aberdeen, Scotland native, who will be entering his 17th season in charge of the Mountaineer program. “The summer competitions are great reference points, and great match experience. Out of that we might create a new training plan for someone, and we’ll have those results in a database at the start of the season. It can also be good motivation.

“It’s a lot like golf, in that it’s individual, but there’s a team aspect in college, and they all have their strengths and things they need to work on. We know what they are doing in their training.”

That training work is of two distinct types. There’s the on-range practice and competition, and there’s also strength and conditioning work, which might not appear to be as much of a factor as it is in some explosion and speed sports, but still has an important function for athletes who must control their bodies for hours at a time.

West Virginia’s new Athletic Performance Center, opened just a couple of months ago, has made work, nutrition, counseling and recovery all more convenient.

“The new center is just so much nicer,” Hammond observed. “We had some of those workout areas and a nutrition space before, but everything is more convenient now. The sports psychology staff is right down the hallway, the athletic training and nutrition areas, all of that is right there on the doorstep. There’s more room, and it’s a wonderful facility. Being able to show all of that to recruits is really good too.”

“General core strength and stability are two of the key items for us,” Hammond explained. “It’s not the explosive stuff, like football or basketball. For us it’s cardio, and balance. There’s strength to help with the core, and they do squats and endurance and high reps with lower weights. Tanner (Kolb), our strength coach, does an awesome job of mixing it up to keep them interested and focused. Trying to stand still over long periods does take muscle endurance, so working on the lower back, with a big variety of exercises, is important.”

Hammond, as most U.S. college coaches are, is dealing with the many changes spawned by NIL and the imminent restructuring of the NCAA. One proposal being discussed in the latter area is the possible elimination of scholarship limitations in Olympic sports. That is not on the near horizon, but could occur in the future as rules and regulations on collegiate athletics are expected to be reduced.

Some schools, such as those anticipating to be flush with cash (think the SEC and the Big 10) would be able to handle the additional costs that would come with such a move.

Currently, rifle is limited to 3.6 scholarships, which are often divided into fractions and split among the 10 or so athletes per squad. If schools were able to offer as many scholarships as they wished, it could change what competitive balance still exists in the sport.

“Is that money there?” Hammond asked rhetorically about West Virginia’s ability to fund such an increase, were it to occur. “We don’t have unlimited money, and we make the most of what we do have. Overall I don’t know if it would be a great thing. We range from schools that have a lot to some that don’t have nearly as much. If limits were just taken away, some of those SEC schools and Big 10 schools might spend more. We would have to find a way to keep up. Most of our athletes also have academic scholarships and other forms of aid, but I think some form of limit keeps competition good.”

No matter how that and other collegiate reforms shake out, Hammond knows that managing the evolving landscape is almost as important as recruiting and competition.

“There’s been so much change in the last year or two. We’ve had a lot of success here, but it’s still a smaller sport. Where will it go in the next 3-4-5 years? Where do we fit in to that? It’s definitely something I’m thinking about a lot.”

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — West Virginia’s rifle program won’t have much turnover when it reassembles for the 2022-23 season, but the changes (and one returnee) will be about as big as moves can get in the program.

In addition to the transfer portal arrival of Olympic medalist and three-time individual NCAA champion Mary Tucker, the Mountaineers will also welcome back super senior Verena Zaisberger, who will use her additional year of eligibility from the COVID waiver year of 2020. Those two are expected to form the backbone of a more experienced 2022-23 team.

That means that from last year’s team, only graduated senior Jared Eddy will not return.

“Jared is off to join the Army and shoot at Fort Benning with the U.S. Army marksmanship team,” WVU rifle head coach Jon Hammond noted.

Zaisberger, a native of Hohenems, Austria, has competed in 39 matches for the Mountaineers over the past four years, earning numerous All-America honors while posting career highs of 598 (out of 600) in air rifle and 593 in smallbore. Her return will be a massive boost for a team that will have just one other senior (Malori Brown).

Then there’s the addition of Tucker, which is akin to a American football team adding a Heisman Trophy winner via the portal. She helped Kentucky win national titles in 2021 and 2022 while capturing three individual national titles of her own.

“There are not a whole lot of transfers in rifle,” Hammond noted, comparing it to the rivers of departures and arrivals that shape the landscape of sports such as football and basketball. “Mary is one. Another (Addy Burrow) is going from NC State to Georgia Southern, maybe one or two others.

“Rifle is a smaller pool of teams and athletes, and I think each transfer has its own circumstances. I found out she was going in (to the portal), and when I did that, we’d have been crazy not to explore that. We obviously were familiar with her, but we didn’t get her out of high school because we didn’t have her major.

“The team and staff here were a big part of her deciding to come here,” he continued. “That reflects well on us, and we want to provide her a great environment where she can thrive for the next two years. I want to make sure she and the rest of the team have the resources and structure they need. I’m excited to see how she fits in.”

With limited roster space (WVU typically keeps theirs at 10, a manageable number that promotes competition but also allows for management of the 3.6 scholarships, which is the maximum NCAA rifle teams can award), Hammond plans to have 11 team members this year, due to the unusual circumstances of Tucker’s availability and Zaisberger’s holdover.

A third change is the addition of Jean-Pierre Lucas to the coaching staff. A nine-time All-American during his career at WVU (2014-17), he served as team captain during his final two seasons before moving on to serve as an assistant coach at Ole Miss, where he earned four Great America Rifle Conference and two Collegiate Rifle Coaches Association Assistant of the Year Awards during his five seasons under former Mountaineer coach Marsha Beasley.

Lucas replaces former WVU assistant Soren Butler, who moved up to the head coaching spot at Georgia Southern, where he landed Burrow as a transfer.

“June 30 was Lucas’ first day,” said Hammond of the onboarding process. “I am very familiar with him. He was a team member here for five years, team captain for two, but there is a transition, though. It’s just different. He brings a different style. Soren did an amazing job for us, but I am a big fan of change. JP’s style and strengths will be different, and I think it is a perfect thing for our team this year.

“I’m excited to work with him, talk about his ideas, what they did at Ole Miss. I am sure he has learned a lot there. For our game plan, little things we might do differently, I want to adjust to that, and have him get to know the team and vice versa. It’s given me a little bit of a new motivation.”

West Virginia University rifle coach Jon Hammond has announced that former Mountaineer and nine-time All-American Jean-Pierre Lucas has been hired as the team’s assistant coach.

“We’re really excited to bring Jean-Pierre back to Morgantown and WVU,” Hammond said. “He set the standard for work ethic and drive in his five years on our team, going from a walk-on to our team captain and leading his team to an NCAA Championship. Not many college athletes leave with five championship rings, and he was a part of the incredible run we had as a team and left an impression on all of his teammates.”

As team captain for both the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons, Lucas led the Mountaineers to two NCAA Championship titles. During his collegiate career, he earned All-American honors nine times, including NRA First Team Smallbore and CRCA Second Team his senior year. Other accomplishments include finishing in third in smallbore (583), and fifth in air rifle (593) at the 2016 GARC Championships.

“I am really excited to return to West Virginia University to join coach Jon Hammond as the assistant rifle coach,” Lucas said. “I enjoyed my time as a student-athlete at WVU, and to have the opportunity to return as a part of the coaching staff is really special. I have spent the past five years as the assistant rifle coach at Ole Miss, and I am leaving an incredible team and athletic department that has helped shape me into the coach that I am today. I am excited to begin the next chapter in my coaching career with the WVU rifle team and look forward to all that we will accomplish together. I am honored to be a Mountaineer again, and thankful to have this opportunity.”

Lucas graduated an Academic All-Big 12 and CRCA All-Academic student from WVU in May 2017 with a bachelor of science in petroleum & natural gas engineering.

Lucas returns to Morgantown after spending the last five seasons at Ole Miss, where he was named the Great American Rifle Conference’s (GARC) Assistant Coach of the Year four times and was the Collegiate Rifle Coaches Association’s (CRAC) National Assistant Coach of the Year in each of the last two seasons.

“The last five years, he has helped transform the Ole Miss rifle team with his coaching, determination and drive to continually find ways to improve, and I’m really excited for him to bring all those things back to WVU,” Hammond added. “It’s special to have that full circle of coaching an athlete, especially a team captain, and bringing them back to coach with you, so to say I’m excited it probably an understatement.”

In his final season at Ole Miss, Lucas helped lead the Rebels to a 10-3 record in the regular season, including a 7-1 mark inside the GARC. After the squad placed third at the 2022 GARC Championships, Ole Miss moved on the 2022 NCAA Championships in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where they placed fourth with an aggregate total of 4713. Lucas once again was named the GARC Assistant Coach of the Year and the CRCA National Assistant Coach of the Year after assisting six shooters to 12 All-GARC honors, including Lea Horvath, who was honored as the conference’s Shooter of the Year. Additionally, Lucas also helped three shooters collect five All-America honors.

In 2020-21, Lucas helped Ole Miss qualify for the NCAA Rifle Championship for the first time in 15 years, earning the No. 2 seed, and went on to place third overall, its highest finish in school history.