Hillsdale shotgun team earns fifth place at nationals

By Carly Moran

Assistant Editor

The Hillsdale shotgun team placed fifth overall in the Association of College Unions International/Scholastic Clay Target Program National Championship. The tournament took place March 21-25 at the National Shooting Complex in San Antonio, Texas. The college competed against 19 other DII schools, winning a variety of accolades.

Besides placing fifth overall, the Chargers won second in DII skeet doubles, and third in both DII American skeet and trap doubles.

“While we did a lot of training and practice in the doubles and sporting clays events, I think we have the most room for improvement in those events,” junior Joshua Corbin said. “Nationals this year proved this, as we lost the most targets to the other teams in sporting clays, so we need to do better to be more competitive as a team.”

Corbin won All-American in Texas and he placed third in men’s skeet doubles.

“We shot really well in skeet doubles as a whole,” head coach Jordan Hintz said. “It continues to be telling, the things that we figured would be important ended up being very important. So we will try to tailor our practices, take advantage of new resources and new training techniques to make sure that we can take another leap forward in those events.”

Senior Ida Brown said that having to balance school with athletics during her time at Hillsdale has ultimately led to her decision to return for a fifth year.

“When I started off at Hillsdale with shotgun and academics, I was very heavily focused on trying to do both super well, and trying to give both of them 100% of my attention was entirely impossible,” Brown said. “I feel like I’ve just been able to learn balance a lot better by this point. To be fair, I’m taking a lot less credits.” Brown said goal setting is important, but so is not being too hard on herself.

“One of my big goals was always to win an HOA title,” Brown said. “To be fair, when I made that goal, I thought I wanted to win an HOA title at Nationals. I didn’t perform very well at Nationals. I finished in the top 20 women which is not at all what I wanted. But, I won

HOA at regionals this season. I would ideally like to be an All-American before I graduate, but my goal right now is to make the Olympic team.”

Brown said 94% humidity with moderate winds acted as a distraction for the already tired athletes in the sporting clays round.

“I think we did a good job of not getting down or isolating ourselves,” Brown said. “I got through the first day and I was like, not what I wanted, but I could do better. Everyone was trying to stay upbeat and encouraging, and made sure that people who were shooting well continued to shoot well.”

Woody Glazer is the only senior graduating from the team this year.

“It’s going to be really hard to see Woody Glazer go,” Hintz said. “He’s been here basically as long as I’ve been coaching. I think he broke a perfect score in more events than anybody else did. Three or four team members may be selected as All-Americans. He was one of our honorable mentions. I don’t know how much that really means to him, but it means a lot to me.”

Four freshmen will join the team this fall. The team will

Golf

have a total of 16 people, the largest roster yet.

“Next year I think the team will be even better,” freshman Leif Andersen said. “The team has four high-caliber recruits coming in, one of which just made the USA Junior World Traveling Team. We will be losing Woodrow Glazer when he graduates this year, which will really hurt our line games as a team, but we have some really good trap shooters coming in as freshmen.”

This was the Chargers’ second year competing at nationals as a DII team. The rankings are based upon how many athletes each team has, with Hillsdale barely sneaking into the DII category. A 16-man roster allows the Chargers to be a more competitive II team, according to Hintz.

“We will have more athletes next year than we’ve ever had before, so that’ll be an interesting challenge,” Hintz said. “The DII teams that beat us, I think three of them had 19 shooters, one of them had 17. They’re considerably larger programs than we are. Next year, I think we’ll finally be taking that leap into being a size that makes it easier for us to be competitive.”