A ‘rebel child’ and a rifle lifer lead Kentucky in quest for third NCAA crown
.jpg "Mary Tucker and Will Shaner both qualified for the U.S. Olympic team last year. They’ll look to lead UK to its third national championship this weekend.")
The top shooters in the state of Kentucky have quite a bit in common.
Both are enrolled at the University of Kentucky.
Both qualified for the U.S. Olympic team last February.
Both lead their respective genders in average aggregate score among all NCAA competitors this season.
Where they differ is their history with rifle, one of the first winter sports whose national championships will be held this month; eight schools and individual qualifiers from seven others will converge in Columbus, Ohio, this weekend for the event.
Will Shaner, a junior, seemingly was destined for greatness. He started shooting as part of a 4-H program in — no joke — Rifle, Colo., when he was 8 years old. He stuck with it as he aged, shooting 3-4 hours a day to hone his abilities. When he wasn’t behind the barrel, he spent as much time as he could reading about psychology to better himself mentally, and building up core strength and improving his cardio.
“People don’t realize rifle is a pretty demanding sport, physically,” Shaner said.
By the time Shaner was 14, he’d traveled several times across the United States for competitions and had even shot internationally in Germany. On the other hand, Mary Tucker, the top-ranked individual entering the weekend and a UK sophomore, didn’t enter a national rifle competition until 2017, a little while after joining the school team at Sarasota Military Academy in Florida. She wasn’t a stranger to guns — hunting was a hobby throughout her youth, and her father was in the military — but she was more likely to have reins in hand than a trigger; Tucker was a state champion in multiple equestrian events while in high school.
She decided to join the rifle team because her mother Jennifer didn’t want her to.
“My mom said I could join any team except for that one, so obviously I picked that one,” Tucker said. “ … My mom just doesn’t like guns. She didn’t want me to go to the military academy. She did not like the military. I’m a rebel child and decided to go there. Pretty much everything she said not to do, I would do.”
Harry Mullins, UK’s rifle coach since 1987, says Shaner and Tucker are somewhere in the top 1-2 percent of shooters who’ve competed for Kentucky in its history.
“And we’ve had Olympic gold medalists come through the program,” he said.
Anthony Davis
A penchant for contrarianism was good enough to help Tucker get on her high school team but she was, in her own words, terrible. Worst on the roster, in fact.
“I could barely even hit the target,” Tucker said. “I worked hard at that ‘cause I really wanted to be better at it.”
Tucker eventually quit the high school team due to internal “drama,” but she kept practicing on her own. She shot targets in the garage and self-taught technique and stances through watching YouTube videos of World Cup performers before finding a local coach. She attended her first national competition in 2017 and in 2019 finished third among women at the USA Shooting Nationals.
Her performance has only improved in the collegiate ranks, where she is now the two-time defending Great American Rifle Conference champion after taking individual honors a couple weekends ago. Her mom has come around, too, though there’s still one aspect of competition with which she struggles.
“She says it’s hard because rifle’s one of the sports where you can’t scream a whole lot,” Tucker said with a laugh. “And my brother plays soccer so she’s used to cheering for him and standing on the sidelines. She’s only gone to a couple matches but she says that there were times where she stood up and started clapping and everybody was kind of looking at her like, ‘What are you doing? We don’t do that here.’”
Mullins likened Tucker’s rapid ascension in the sport to that of another late-bloomer with whom Kentucky fans are familiar.
“You gotta ask Anthony Davis,” said Mullins, referring to the former No. 1 overall NBA Draft pick who experienced a late growth spurt in high school. “It’s kind of the same mentality at the end of the day. From an athletic mentality, we believe and feel you have to know every nuance about the sport to be at an elite level. Granted, she’s made up a lot of lost ground in comparison to some of the kids that may have started 3-4 years earlier, but on the flip side she has a very competitive drive.
“She’s not about minimums, she’s about maximums.”
When she broke through and started succeeding at a high level, Tucker says she experienced some eye-rolling and envy from folks who’d spent more time in the sport than her. Generally, though, the rifle community has been supportive.
Shaner says it took him a while to get to the level of shooting that Tucker’s at, but doesn’t mind that his road was longer. He has nearly a decade more experience banked for when the pressure’s really on, which is great, but …
“It’s always weird when I realize she’s only been shooting for 4-5 years and I’ve been doing it for 12 now,” Shaner said with a laugh. “It’s like, ‘Wow,’ and kind of makes me feel old even though I’m only turning 20 this year.”
Second place
Missing from both of their impressive resumes are wins, individual or team, in the NCAA Championships.
A team title seemed to be all but in the bag for Kentucky last year before the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the 2020 event, which was scheduled to take place in Memorial Coliseum, a brief walk from Buell Armory and Barker Hall, the team’s regular range.
“We were pretty well ahead of most other teams,” Shaner said. “We didn’t feel like we had something to prove but we were excited to show them what we could do. This year it’s transitioned and it’s gotten really competitive. For the amount of scores we shot as a team, we had basically the highest scores in program history consistently, but at the same time a lot of other schools are catching up and it’s been a lot more competitive and a lot more intense in general.”
Kentucky is still among the favorites to take home a national championship this weekend, but the Wildcats haven’t been as dominant as they were last season. UK was unbeaten a year ago, and returned its top five scorers from that squad, but has won only 12 of the 14 events in which it’s participated this season. The non-wins came at Mississippi on Jan. 18 (4,727 to 4,713) and in the GARC Championships, where Kentucky finished second to West Virginia at the end of February.
The Wildcats’ average aggregate score is less than two points behind West Virginia’s for the season — they check in at 4,718.909 against WVU’s 4,720.875 — and if they were to overtake the Mountaineers at the finish line they wouldn’t be blazing trails; when UK won its second national title in 2018, it finished No. 2 to WVU in that season’s GARC championships.
“It’s hard because we get graded on the end and sometimes the end doesn’t reflect the work that you did throughout the course of the year,” said Mullins, who also led UK to the 2011 championship. “But this team’s done a phenomenal job so far.”
Given their most recent result and the way last season ended, Kentucky’s shooters don’t lack for motivational material. Every team has one or two “top dogs,” Mullins said, from whom big scores can be expected. How UK’s collection of other shooters — among them GARC championship scorers Hailee Sigmon, Jaden Thompson and Richard Clark — rise to the occasion will ultimately be a distinguishing factor.
Sometimes they push themselves too hard, to try and match what Shaner and Tucker deliver, Mullins says, but he believes they’ll meet the moment appropriately. Tucker is too.
“This sport is 95 percent mental. It doesn’t really matter what kind of body type you have, if you can sit still or can’t sit still, it really doesn’t matter,” Tucker said. “If you can think that you’re gonna do it, then you can do it. …
“I think everyone knows what to do. We’ve been working hard all semester and we’ve had a really good year, especially considering all the things that have been thrown at us.”
2021 NCAA Rifle Championships
When: Friday (9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.) and Saturday (9:45 a.m.-3:45 p.m.).
Where: Ohio State University’s Converse Hall in Columbus, Ohio.
Teams: Air Force, Alaska-Fairbanks, Kentucky, Memphis, Nebraska, Ole Miss, TCU, West Virginia.
Individual qualifiers: Murray State has three qualifiers and Morehead State has one alternate.
How to watch: Livestream available on NCAA.com.
