Over 30 high school athletes filtered through the E.F. Horton Range in the Patty Center basement this past weekend for the 2018 Mid Alaska Conference (MAC) Rifle Championships. MAC includes rifle teams from Fairbanks (Lathrop, West Valley, and Hutchison), Delta and Valdez. This year, these teams had to overcome more than just their competitors to make the championships. They had to survive proposed budget cuts which would have eliminated some high school rifle programs across the state. One such budget proposal for the 2018-2019 school year threatened to cut rifle, hockey, and cheer teams from local high schools. If approved, this cut would have eliminated three out of the five schools competing in this weekend’s championship, Lathrop, Hutchison, and West Valley. Though these teams made it past the budgetary chopping block, funding for new teams took a hit.
On top of the budget cut scare, the conference struggled with coaching shortages. In response, one coach took over two teams. West Valley’s coach had resigned the week of tryouts, so Audrey Lammers, Hutchinson’s rifle team coach, felt a responsibility to take on the extra work. She explained, “If West Valley didn’t have a team, anyone who wanted to shoot rifle would be eligible to shoot at any other school in the district, so their [West Valley’s] good shooters would have flooded the Hutchison and the Lathrop teams, meaning we could not pick up any new shooters. We would not have room for them.“
Spending an average of 20 hours at the range every week, on top of her daily job, Lammers was swamped. “It is a lot of work. Some things fall through the cracks, like ordering gear and stuff.’ In additions, she worried about short-changing the athletes. She said, “After two hours at the range, now there are two more [hours], and there is always that underlying worry, ‘am I giving this team enough?’’
It is particularly remarkable that Lammer’s is coaching two teams, because she has no previous rifle experience. She relies on the experiences of others to elevate her team above the rest. She makes it work with the help of former rifle athletes from both schools who volunteer their time to coach students about the finer points of competitive rifle. Lammer’s explained her motivation. “At the end of the day those kids are family. That is why I do it.’
In addition to Hutchinson and West Valley High Schools, rifle athletes from Lathrop, Delta and Valdez competed at the weekends championship. It was Valdez High School’s debut at the Mid Alaska Rifle Championship. They have competed as a club team for years in Alaska, but this season is the first that they competed as a school-sanctioned sport. Valdez’s rifle co-coach, Jim Larcom commented, “We have been competing with Delta and coming up here and see all of the high school teams at [the state] JORC match (Junior Olympic Rifle Championship) and we were like, ‘we should try to petition and get a high school team.’’ Second year Valdez rifle co-coach, Victoria Hedman added, “It was about a three month process to get approved by the board,’ The wait was worth it as the Valdez rifle team swept bronze in all three events, smallbore team, air rifle team, and overall team, over the weekend.
However this is not Valdez rifle’s first big competition. They competed previously in the state qualifier, otherwise known as JORC, for the Junior Olympic Championships in Colorado Springs, Colo. Larcom comments, “ We have come up and shot JORC every year as a club so most of our athletes have been up here and seen it before. It is always a good time to come up here and shoot against the other teams, other than just on our range practicing. It is good to have the competition from outside, opposed to the kids we see every day at practice.’ Nodding in agreement, Hedman chimed in, “It is really exciting and really neat to see how the whole team was up for the challenge. They all stepped up, and they are really excited to be here, so that energy kind of transfers over to the whole team, even us as coaches.’
The Mid Alaska Conference has played a large part in advancing rifle athletes in interior Alaska. UAF’s own rifle team currently includes three former MAC alum: Senior, J.T. Schnering (Lathrop), and juniors, Amy Gentry (Hutchison) and Liam Eberhart (Lathrop).
