After placing second at the Association of College Unions International Collegiate National Championship in 2019 and 2018, the Texas A&M trap and skeet club won the national title this past March despite the challenges faced due to COVID-19.
Established in 1971, the trap and skeet club aims to unite Aggies with a shared passion of clay target shooting sports, according to its website.
Incoming co-president of the club and industrial distribution senior Dominic Gross has been a member of the team since 2017 and said he has seen the team’s dynamic shift since then.
“From then until now, we just kind of really refined how focused our team is because in the past I would say it was more socially based than it was competitively based,” Gross said. “Now it’s much more of a competitive team environment more so than a club.”
With Gross’s final season playing out unexpectedly, he said he was most motivated by this being his class’s last national championship.
“Everything was just kind of ramped up this year, especially because that initial group of freshmen that we had that was so competitive in 2017 — the year that we came really close — we were all seniors this year, so we all basically knew that this was our last chance to make something happen,” Gross said.
Back-to-back ACUI Women’s National Champion and public health senior Meagan Harrington said while the COVID-19 limitations deprived the team of the full experience, she found it made them stronger in the end.
“This year with COVID[-19], no spectators or visitors were allowed, so for us graduating seniors, it was hard to be there without our parents,” Harrington said. “But at the same time, our team was stronger than ever knowing that we had to rely on one another. It was a lot that we had to deal with, so this win means so much that we were able to genuinely win in probably the hardest season possible.”
Economics freshman Clifford Seibert just finished his first season with the team and said the underclassmen were also motivated to secure a win for the senior class.
“Everybody there wants each other to do well and there’s a lot of talent on the team and everybody just wants to see each other do better,” Seibert said. “We all wanted to win because we had a bunch of seniors on the team. We were all just grinding it out so they could have an opportunity to win, and it just happened to turn out in our favor.”
Unlike its opponents, the A&M team produces its own funding through events it puts on each year rather than being sponsored by the university. Gross said the fundraising his team has has to do adds to the feeling of winning.
“The other schools had way more personnel than we had in terms of coaching [and] resources. They’re just prepared way more for this level of competition than we were,” Gross said. “We just had to do what we could with what we had, and the fact that we were able to pull it off made it really special.”
Harrington said in wrapping up her final season on the team, she felt appreciative of her friendships and of the community shared by Aggies.
“[I most appreciate] the people and the comradery. I’ve met some of my lifelong best friends,” Harrington said. “In the big picture scheme of things it’s adding more people to your Aggie Network, and that, to me, is the most important thing of all, the network that we get to experience as Aggies.”
Looking ahead to his next three years, Seibert said he has his sights set high for the evolving team.
“We have a lot of new talent coming in next year, some really good shooters,” Seibert said. “I would just like to see the team grow as a whole, get as many people involved as possible and just see it grow from here because I think there’s a lot of potential and a lot more winning to do.”