Now one of the nation’s premier collegiate shooting teams, the Texas A&M Corps of Cadets Marksmanship Unit (CCMU) competes in statewide and national events in a variety of shooting sports. Since it was founded in 2012, the team has received high rankings at multiple annual events.
The Aggie Marksmanship unit attended the first annual 2018 Sig Sauer Relentless Warrior Combat Weapons Championship on March 24, where they competed against over 90 cadets from the nation’s top military schools. The day-long event is a three-gun match among service and senior military academies in which shooters encounter targets from distances of five to 200 meters in each of the five stages in the competition.
The CCMU team placed first in the overall Sig Sauer match. Five cadets placed in the top eight in individual scoring including wildlife and fisheries sciences senior Wade Ledbetter placing first, first sergeant and university studies junior Christopher (Kit) Hoog placing second, CCMU commander and wildlife and fisheries sciences senior Nick Mrak placing third.
“This Sig Sauer Relentless Warrior competition is more of an action shooting, where you don’t know the stages beforehand, you show up and they brief you the stage,” Nathan Schwebel, the unit’s assistant PR officer and international studies senior, said. “The goal of these competitions is more of like evaluating our team’s ability to shoot in like combat scenarios … it’s more of a realistic kind of simulation for us to shoot.”
A&M’s CCMU Centerfire Alpha team placed first in the Scholastic Action Shooting Program (SASP) 2018 National Collegiate Championship March 10, 2018 at the CMP Talladega Marksmanship Park in Talladega, Alabama. Unlike the Sig Sauer Championship, the SASP competition focuses specifically on a shooter accuracy.
“That is a kind of an action-shooting competition, so the SASP is a steel shooting and it’s just the same five stages every year,” Schwebel said. “[It judges] a shooter’s raw talent in shooting specifically because everyone knows what’s going to happen. Everybody knows all the stages you just go out there and you shoot as fast as you can and the team with the lowest time is the winner.”
CCMU Centerfire Alpha team has won the event three years in a row and four of the the last five years. The team placed first in the centerfire event with a time of 165.79 seconds, the team’s lowest competitive time.
Head coach Kevin Jimmerson has been leading the CCMU team since 2011. To prepare his team for competition, Jimmerson trains his team to focus on the basics.
“I teach a very disciplined focus on fundamentals,” Jimmerson said. “Just like in basketball, if your team can dribble, pass and shoot, you likely will have a good team. Skill is the mastery of the fundamental elements of what you are doing.”
To maintain their skills, team members dry fire shooting drills for two hours every Wednesday on campus to practice reload movements and trigger presses. Live fire practices are held every Friday at an ranch off campus with drills and different stages.
“We’ll find ways to push our shooters in new ways and learn new habits and techniques—how to get faster,” Schwebel said. “We try and shoot a hosted competition at least once a month … so we get to compete against people other than ourselves and learn new things from new people.”