ings from established stars once the competition began.
Zach
Nannini, with his slightly knock- kneed stance and his slow, de- liberate call for the target (many Lindenwood shooters say “Haw” instead of “Pull” because it jerks facial muscles less), felt ready to roll. Growing up, Nannini, the son of a painting contractor in San Jose, California, spent the money he earned painting houses on shotgun shells and clay pigeons. He never planned to attend college—he had been home- schooled—until Lindenwood found him and offered scholar- ship money to shoot. Now planning a career in sales and marketing,
Nannini
stands under a cool, overcast sky at the 671-acre National Shoot- ing Complex in San Antonio and smokes 98 out of 100 clay tar- gets. But nine other shooters score perfect 100s, and Nannini doesn’t make the medal round shoot-off. Nannini’s was not the fi rst stumble in the team’s quest for the X. The American skeet prelim saw fi ve shooters from
other teams break 100 targets— and four Lindenwood shooters break 99, all missing the medal round by one bird. Adding insult to injury, the game was won by Casey Jones of Bethel University, a Presbyterian college of about 5,000 students in Tennessee and one of the few programs with a distinct vision of shoving Lindenwood from its throne. The following day a group of Bethel shooters sit around a lunch table overlooking the up- per shooting range, still in high spirits. “Anytime the purple and gold [Bethel] beats the black and gold [Lindenwood] in any- thing—football, cornhole, a piss- ing contest—this table is gonna be proud,” says a twenty-one- year-old named Joey Williams. The big secret to Linden-
wood’s success is no secret to schools like Bethel. Because then-president Dennis Spell- mann wanted a shooting team, Lindenwood became, in 2002, the fi rst fully funded colle- giate shooting sports team in the country, offering a range of scholarship packages,
which 50 USA Shooting News | March 2014
gave the school a dis- tinct advantage. Steve Wolk, the shooting team’s director of op- erations, tells me that in the few weeks before nationals, Lin- denwood shooters blew through 30,000 rounds of ammunition a week. The Lions spend about $200,000 on shotgun shells a year, Wolk says. The team doesn’t have a formal budget that he knows of; Wolk submits propos- als to his higher-ups and they either approve or ask him to trim. For the nationals, Wolk says, the university approved an $85,000 budget to fl y the team to San An- tonio and accommodate them. On top of that, Dulohery em- ploys his web of shooting world connections to leverage other resources which is partly why, for instance, the Lions are the Or- egon Ducks of college shooting, with at least a dozen different uniform combinations. Of the sixty-fi ve teams com- peting in San Antonio—including those from Oklahoma, Clemson, Texas, Florida, Kentucky, Purdue, Virginia, and Yale—most operate
Lindenwood celebrates their 2013 National Championship by empty- ing the cooler on Lindenwood coach Shawn Dulohery.
with minimal university support. Bethel has unabashedly set its sights on trying to clip Linden- wood’s wings by offering schol- arships of its own. Its national championship squad comprises thirty-four shooters. “Our stated goal every shoot is to win the event,” says Bub Ed- wards, Bethel’s head coach and a friendly rival of Dulohery’s. “Our unstated goal is to beat Linden- wood, because that’s the only way you’re going to win the event. But we are going to be the fi rst team to beat them.”
Read the rest of this story on Garden & Gun’s website.
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