This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
ACUI


Straight Shooters: Lindenwood Lions


Below is an excerpt from a story that ran in the August 2013 edition of Garden and Gun and is included with special permission. To read the entire story, please visit Garden & Gun’s website at http://gardenandgun.com/article/straight-shooters-lindenwood-lions.


Zach Nannini is a hustler. He wears a T-shirt that says


“hustler,” in case you don’t catch on from the fact that he totes a handheld case of cigars—Domin- icans, Cubans—and brings his own poker chips on road trips.


nini were supposed to carry the Lindenwood Lions at the forty- fi fth annual Association of Col- lege Unions International (ACUI) Clay Target Championships in San Antonio, Texas, in late March. Shooters compete in six


est game to win. Twice I’ve run two hundred and twenty-seven straight targets and lost. I can teach anybody to shoot trap and in a couple months they’ll shoot ninety, but that’s not going to win anything. Mentally going beyond


and had already won nine na- tional championships, Dulohery felt confi dent enough that he’d dubbed this season “The Year of the X.”


Although not the coach who


launched the Lindenwood pro- gram, Dulohery is the one who saved it. In 2008, after claiming


Lindenwood, a private liberal arts college of about 17,000 students in St. Charles, Mo., stood on the verge of winning its 10th consecutive national collegiate shooting championship—a rare feat in any sport, at any level and boasts National Team members Dustin Perry (left) Morgan Craft (top right) and Jake Wallace (below).


He’s also a straight shooter, in the most literal way. Nannini, a junior business administration major at Lindenwood University, is one of the fi nest American trap shooters in the country, and part of the reason that last spring, Lindenwood, a private liberal arts college of about 17,000 stu- dents in St. Charles, Mo., stood on the verge of winning its tenth consecutive national collegiate shooting championship—a rare feat in any sport, at any level. Established gunners like Nan-


events, or “games,” over six days to determine the winning school. A few weeks earlier in a major shoot in Tucson, Nannini blasted 425 straight targets without a miss to beat 824 shooters of all ages. The following weekend he ran 100 straight. Nannini’s game, American


Trap, is not hard at a basic level—targets always fl y at the same speed and elevation, al- ways away from you at some angle. “It’s the easiest game to learn,” he says, “but it’s the hard-


48 USA Shooting News | March 2014


that is hard as hell.” Almost as hard as winning


ten consecutive collegiate na- tional titles. Lindenwood coach Shawn


Dulohery, a supersize banty rooster with a head the dimen- sions of a cinder block, brought a team of fi fty-six shooters and seven coaches (there are close to a hundred Lindenwood team members) to San Antonio. Con- sidering the Lindenwood Shot- gun Sports team has been in existence for only eleven years


the school’s fi fth straight nation- al championship, a group of Lin- denwood shooters boozed up on the bus ride from San Antonio to St. Charles (the coaches traveled in a separate van). After off-load- ing back at school, four team members continued celebrat- ing. Several hours later, one of them drove his pickup truck into someone’s house near campus. Lindenwood offi cials terminated founding coach Joe Steenbergen and suspended the entire team. Hunter Hopkins—a gradu-


ate student appearing at his last national fi nals in 2013 who


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68