Published: January 19, 2008 06:37 pm         

Eight-decade-old Rose-Hulman rifle team continues to fare well at national level

TERRE HAUTE — He (or she) shoots! He (or she) scores!

No, this is not another story on the subject of basketball. It’s a story about the Rose-Hulman rifle team, a little-known sport at the school despite having been around for more than eight decades. Interestingly, Rose is the only school competing in rifle as an NCAA sport in Indiana.

Doing well too, as the Engineers entered this season with 11 consecutive national top 25 finishes.

If you need further proof of its existence, look closely at the facade of Cook Stadium and you will see six sandstone carvings representing each of the sports played in 1948 at Rose. One depicts the ROTC origins of the rifle team.

Yet still to this day, many of the school’s students have no clue where the competitions are held on campus.

Nestled beneath the Cook Stadium’s permanent stands and behind its concession stand is the school’s 10-point shooting range which was built in 1998. If you look closely, the “R” in Rose-Hulman on the door just to left of the concession stand has a partial bullseye, indicating the entrance to the shooting range.

Jason LaBella, currently in his third year as head coach of the rifle team at Rose, is the school’s most prolific rifle alumnus. LaBella earned All-American honors in 2004, placing 11th individually in air rifle competition at the NCAA Rifle Championships.

How did LaBella become a standout rifle competitor?

“I started shooting in boy scouts, earning a merit badge,” recalled LaBella, a native of Massena, N.Y. “I was more into basketball in junior high school, but I got hurt and couldn’t play in high school. I was told I could stay in basketball as a team manager, but I was not fond of the idea of becoming a manager.

“So I joined the rifle team in Massena and I did well. We made it to the New York state championships as a freshman. I was captain the next three years and finished second my senior year at the New York state championship.”

LaBella, a 2004 Rose graduate currently working the past 11⁄2 years as a product engineer at TRW in Marshall, Ill., also competed for the New York State Rifle Team, which won the national championship twice in his four years on the team.

LaBella stressed that in rifle, unlike basketball or football, “physicality only helps you so much. It’s more of a mental sport.”

According to LaBella, many of his team members come to the sport as walk-ons, having never shot a rifle. Some come to the sport with a hunting background, but LaBella has to “get them more precision-minded.” Other kids come to the sport from junior ROTC programs in high school.

“I was a walk-on my freshman year … didn’t have much experience shooting a firearm,” recalled Rose senior team captain Tommy Buetow. “I had a friend trying out for the team and decided it would be fun to give it a shot [pun not intended]. Turned out I was pretty good at it and I’ve been on the team for four years. Absolutely love it.

“Before I came to Rose, I had shot a firearm once in my life. My parents never had a firearm. I came here and I got to play with guns,” he added with a grin.

Buetow, a native of Louisville, Ky., majoring in electrical engineering, echoed his coach, saying, “It’s a very mental game. It’s a lot of how well can you focus on the task at hand, not get frazzled by a bad shot. And that’s the hardest part. Take a bad shot, it’s very easy to get angry, get down. But you need to use each individual shot as it’s own separate game.

“Each shot you take is a complete refocus. Whatever happened before … get it out of your mind. Don’t focus ahead, always on the task at hand. One shot at a time and just go through it slowly. Anyone can come down and shoot a 10 once. But, you need stamina, the control to be able to stick through an entire match.”

Rifle matches consist of two types of shooting acumen, smallbore (3x20) and air rifle (60). In smallbore, each shooter has two hours to take 60 shots, 20 shots apiece standing, kneeling and prone from a distance of 50 feet. After a half-hour break, another two hours is devoted to air rifle, consisting of 60 shots from 10 meters (about 32.8 feet).

The shooters fire at targets that are about 11⁄2 inches wide, with the center of the target1⁄2 millimeter in diameter. Or as LaBella describes, “about the size of a pin head.”

While you don’t need to be a bruising, muscular specimen, there is a physical aspect to the sport.

“To some degree,” noted Buetow. “You need to be able to hold up the rifle, be able to hold your position. We try to keep ourselves in decent physical shape. I do a very simple exercise routine outside of rifle. Building muscles isn’t a very good idea because it will get you shaky.

“The goal is to use as little muscle as possible in holding the rifle, because your muscles are not reliable. You want to build up your bone structure, your body’s skeletal structure in such a way basically, if you took everything away but your skeleton you’d be holding the rifle. What’s so hard is it takes a lot of work to get to that point.

“When you think about it, our 10-dot [bullseye] is a less than a millimeter across and it’s 50 feet away. There’s a very small movement allowed.”

Only about 45 schools nationally compete in NCAA rifle, with the Division III Engineers competing against all schools, whether they be Division I, II or III.

Still, Rose has done exceedingly well through the years without athletic scholarships. LaBella added that the cost factor keeps top shooters from attending Rose when they can earn engineering degrees at Ohio State or Kentucky, which also have NCAA rifle teams.

Oh yes, the sport is not limited to men. Three female shooters competed in equal standing for visiting Ohio State, in town for a match with Rose on Jan.12. Recently for Rose, Jennifer Lowe was the school’s first first-team Academic All-American in any sport while competing in 2004.

Rose fell to the Buckeyes 4,483-4,323, slipping to 1-5 this season, but the team did set team prone school record with a score of 772 and four team members had personal best efforts. Buetow led Rose with a total tally of 1,099.

While the Rose facilities don’t lend themselves to a large fan turnout — think medium-sized picture window as an observation area. But the sport did see its largest turnout for a NCAA Rifle Championship last year in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Host team Alaska-Fairbanks won its eighth title in nine years last year, with over 1,500 turning out for the competition. On the final day, electronic scoring allowed results to be tracked instantly on giant video screens.

Rose’s match with Ohio State was its final home match of the season. Beginning Saturday, the Engineers compete over the next two weekends at Tennessee-Martin, Murray State, Kentucky and Morehead State. The NCAA qualifier is at Columbus, Ohio on Feb. 16.