Clemson air rifle club team wins national championship

Published: April 20, 2010

Members of the air rifle club team are: (front row) Trey Jordan, Chase Dixon, Erin Gotterbarm, Amy Presher; (standing) Eugene Diefenbach, John Cummings (coach), Dylan Smith, Jordan Smith. image by: Clemson University

CLEMSON — Clemson University’s air rifle club team won the Intercollegiate Rifle Club Championship at Purdue University.

The team won first place in the air rifle competition and third place in the small-bore competition at the April 9-11 championship. It was the team’s first time competing in the small-bore category. Air rifles use compressed air to shoot a small pellet. Rifles in the small-bore competition are traditional .22-caliber rifles using gunpowder and lead bullets.

Three of the team members were named to the NRA’s All-American Air Rifle Team: Jordan Smith, a senior history major from Charlotte, N.C.; Erin Gotterbarm, a freshman psychology major from Cayce; and Amy Presher, a sophomore packaging science major from Greenville.

Other members of the team competing at the national championship were Chase Dixon, a senior biological sciences major from Anderson; Eugene Diefenbach, a senior soils and sustainable crop systems major from Fairfax Station, Va.; and Trey Jordan, a freshman general engineering major from Darlington.

The event marked the first-ever national championship tournament for collegiate air rifle teams.

“All shooters were proud of their accomplishment, as was I, and it was an even greater victory by having all the schools present to compete shoulder-to-shoulder,” said team coach John Cummings, an instructor in biological sciences. “The first name to ever be listed as the Collegiate Shooting Championship winner is Clemson. It will always be on the top of the list of the most-successful shooting teams, and I hope to see the Clemson name repeated on that list many times in the future.”

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