MORGANTOWN, W.VA. –More than 60,000 people jam into Milan Puskar Stadium to cheer West Virginia’s football team on Saturdays each fall. This winter, 14,000 will pack WVU Coliseum to root on a Mountaineers men’s basketball team with Final Four aspirations.But neither team is as central to this state’s hard-working identity as one that draws virtually no spectators yet is exceptional on two counts.West Virginia’s rifle team is the only Mountaineers squad to have won an NCAA championship — 14, in fact. And it’s the only team with its own line item in the state budget: a $100,000 annual appropriation that represents a none-too-subtle rebuke to a university that dropped its most decorated sport in 2003.The team’s reinstatement and subsequent reclamation of its status as the nation’s preeminent shooting power is one of the more improbable comebacks in college sports. Instead of aspiring professional athletes, the key players were rank-and-file taxpayers, disillusioned parents and students, and small businesses such as Donnie’s Citgo and Bub’s Bar and Grill that mobilized a grass-roots fundraising campaign and lobbying campaign and forced the university to change its mind. “Hunting and shooting is a big thing here,” says junior Brandi Eskew of Petersburg, W.Va., one of two women on WVU’s rifle team, who learned to hunt alongside her father as a child. “It’s something that pretty much everyone does at some point. And it’s something they can relate to more than a lot of other sports.”This past spring, West Virginia won its first NCAA title since 1998. Off to a 6-0 start this season, the No. 1-ranked Mountaineers are on track to win a 15th championship.”What was not understood was that people appreciated excellence,” said Marsha Beasley, who coached the Mountaineers to eight NCAA rifle titles. “West Virginia comes up ranked 40th or 50th on list after list of things. People had always liked that the rifle team had been on top so much.”West Virginia bills itself as a hunter’s paradise, with 1.6 million acres of public hunting ground teeming with deer, black bear and wild turkey. The two weeks of deer season alone pump $250 million into the state’s coffers, according to the governor’s office. And nearly every family has at least one member who takes part.According to one study, West Virginia ranks fifth in the nation in terms of its gun-ownership rate (55.4 percent), trailing only Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and South Dakota.So it’s little wonder that WVU was a national power from the moment the NCAA designated rifle as a scholarship sport in 1980, either winning the national title or finishing as runner-up every year until 1998.Contested in indoor shooting ranges, NCAA-style rifle is an entirely different type of marksmanship from hunting. There are two disciplines: air rifle, in which standing shooters fire lead pellets at targets 10 meters away; and smallbore, in which shooters fire .22 caliber smallbore rifles at targets 50 feet away from prone, kneeling and standing positions. While some say it’s 90 percent mental, it also represents a withering test of balance, abdominal strength and stamina.That appealed to Bryant Wallizer of Little Orleans, Md., a WVU senior who plans to start training for the 2012 Olympics after graduating in the spring.”Guns kind of have negative connotations, but for me there’s been nothing but good that’s come out of shooting,” Wallizer said. “It teaches discipline, task-performing mannerisms, a very acute sense to detail.”
‘Restore the Glory’ The university’s rifle prowess was the main reason Eskew wanted to enroll at West Virginia. Wallizer says it’s the only reason he even considered going to college. So both were stunned when they heard, while still in high school, that West Virginia was dropping its team, along with four men’s teams — tennis, cross-country and indoor and outdoor track.It wasn’t that WVU’s athletic department was running a deficit. Rather, university officials concluded that the only way WVU could become more competitive in the high-stakes world of college sports was to cut five teams and spend the savings (roughly $600,000 in what was then a $27 million budget) on better facilities and more scholarships.”[Dropping teams] was the last thing we wanted to do,” Athletic Director Ed Pastilong says today. “But unfortunately, that was the conclusion.”The backlash was immediate.Students fired off e-mails. Alumni collected 9,000 signatures on a petition demanding the team’s return. The National Rifle Association wrote letters disputing the university’s claim that the sport was too costly. (The team’s $163,000 budget accounted for less than 1 percent of the athletic department budget.) And most team members refused to stop practicing and formed a club instead, with Beasley, who was kept on the payroll until she found another job, serving as the club’s adviser.”They hung tough,” says Ron Justice, West Virginia’s director of Student Organization Services, who was then Morgantown’s mayor. “They said, ‘We’re going to do what we think we need to do to get this program reinstated.’ “Armed with the slogan “Restore the Glory,” Justice helped the students mount a fundraising campaign to bankroll their club and prove to WVU’s administration just how much statewide support they had.(Though the university had stripped the team of its budget, which meant no money for travel, the students’ scholarships were honored until they graduated or transferred.)An outpouring of goodwill followed, from $2 checks on up. A local Harley-Davidson shop donated an Orange County Chopper as the grand prize for a raffle. A vineyard owner hosted a wild-game dinner. Meantime, phones rang off the hook at the state legislature.
‘I guess we misjudged’ The political maneuvering that followed was tricky. The university chafed at overt attempts to micromanage its athletic department. So with scant debate, West Virginia lawmakers appropriated $100,000 for the disbanded rifle team.Soon after, in March 2004, WVU President David C. Hardesty, a former Mountaineers student body president and Rhodes scholar, announced he was reinstating the team. Today, he insists that politics played no role in the decision.”I guess we misjudged the civic pride and passion West Virginians have in their national championship team,” Hardesty says. “We bear the state’s name. We’re almost as old as the state. We’re the flagship university, and they want us to fly their flag. And we all got back together on what the nature of that flag was.”While the $100,000 appropriation was critical in restarting the team, it still left a $63,000 shortfall, so fundraising efforts continued. Two years into the rebuilding effort, Beasley resigned, feeling the enmity of the fight had undercut her ability to advocate for the team.”The reason we have sports in college is that athletics provides a learning experience that you can’t get in a classroom,” Beasley says. “What the university did in that decision is [say] they didn’t care about the students’ learning experience but said, ‘We want to be in the entertainment business.’ No one would admit it, but there is a certain faction that would like to have just football and nothing else. Or maybe basketball.”One of her graduate students — Jon Hammond, a former world junior rifle champion from Scotland — took the reins with a five-year plan for restoring the team’s prominence.Hammond, 29, who represented Great Britain in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, is well ahead of schedule, having sold promising recruits (including Eskew and Wallizer, who transferred to WVU) on the opportunity to help reclaim that glory. They did that in dramatic, come-from-behind fashion at the NCAA championships this past March.While the rifle team continues to receive its unique annual state appropriation, fundraising efforts haven’t stopped. Since 2003, boosters have raised nearly $1 million on the team’s behalf, with much of that going toward an endowment to ensure its stability.”The good thing that happened in this whole thing was a lot of people are connected to West Virginia University through the rifle team,” says Justice, the university official and former Morgantown mayor. “They might not have a child in school or didn’t attend themselves. But it’s almost like it has been adopted as West Virginia’s team.”