MORGANTOWN, W.Va. - Ed Etzel had just won a Gold medal in the men's English match smallbore rifle competition at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, just the seventh gold claimed by an American during the Games when he did it.
 
He had won other major events in the past, such as the 1978 World Championships, the 1979 Pan American Games and the 1983 Airgun National Championships … but winning the gold in the Olympics - in the U.S. mind you - brought unprecedented publicity and exposure to West Virginia University's rifle program, of which he had become its caretaker following a quick handoff from the school's ROTC program in 1977.
 
Etzel was the first civilian to coach West Virginia University rifle, a sport first sponsored by athletics in 1951 but had existed in some form on campus well before that dating back to the early 1900s. Since 1951, it was led by a series of majors, captains, sergeants and master sergeants from WVU's ROTC program, men who coached the team for a few years before they were either promoted or were transferred to other locations.
 
West Virginia won four National Rifle Association (NRA) titles with four different coaches in 1961, 1964, 1966 and 1976, produced a half dozen or so All-American shooters including Bruce Meredith, Dean Bahrman and Jack Writer, who won a Gold medal at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, and was generally considered the Mountaineers' most successful athletic program.
 
Yet rifle was basically viewed, in Etzel's words, as an "orphan activity."
 
It continued to be an orphan activity when Etzel coached the team to a couple of third-place finishes at the NRA Championships in 1978 and 1979, and then to three straight runner-up placings at the NCAA Championships once the organization brought rifle under its jurisdiction, which, incidentally, also helped save the WVU rifle program from being dropped.
 
"A lot of people don't remember this," Etzel recalled recently, "but the team was going to be done away with in 1979-80 when Mountaineer Field was being built. It was in the process of becoming an NCAA sport at the time, but there was a lot of political involvement within the state, as I understand it, although I didn't have any involvement with it.
 
"I believe the National Rifle Association lobbied people (to keep rifle as a WVU sport) - that's what I was told - but I didn't go around politicking about it," Etzel added.
 
Even during those years when Etzel led West Virginia to three straight national runner-up finishes in 1980, 1981 and 1982, losing all three times to Etzel's alma mater, Tennessee Tech, rifle was still only viewed as a second-class sport within the athletic department.
 
Some of the coaches and staff members used to sit around in the summertime and joke about rifle not really being a legitimate sport, just a bunch of guys laying on their stomachs out in the woods shooting bb guns, they used to say. 
 
Team discipline, they joked, was basically a matter of the offending person being required to hold a target while their teammates got to shoot at it.  
 
Before the NCAA took over rifle, dual matches were frequently shot at the team's home sites so the scores had to be called in. Therefore, as some of the other coaches used to quip, winning a rifle match wasn't dependent so much upon shooting straight as it was which team called in their scores last.
 
"It was like playing a football game by yourself and keeping score," Etzel explained. "People were entrusted to shoot targets and they were sent to a central location and then the scores were called in. That is the way it was done for decades, going back to the 1920s, because it was impossible otherwise."

No Longer an "Orphan Activity"
 
Despite its considerable success through the years, rifle was still pretty much foreign and unknown to almost everyone on campus until Etzel began patiently and methodically developing it into one of the most successful athletic programs in NCAA history.
 
Gun ownership and hunting have always been an integral part of West Virginia's Appalachian heritage, dating back to the state's creation in 1863. Plus, WVU's mascot, the Mountaineer, carries a musket, so WVU rifle has always sort of held a kindred-spirit relationship with the people of the state.
 
But there wasn't a ball to throw or catch or hit or kick, a field to navigate or a court to seize. Nobody watched the rifle team compete nor was it really all that interesting to sit around and see someone take a couple of hours to shoot a bunch of targets.
 
Etzel, by the way, was a notoriously fast shooter. It took him just 20 minutes out of his allotted time of one hour, 45 minutes to accomplish his near-perfect score of 599 when he won his Gold medal out in LA.
 
Why stick around and wait for the wind to start blowing harder or get a cramp standing in the same position for two hours straight? When everyone else is out there trying to keep focused on shooting bull's-eyes, I can be sitting inside in the air conditioning throwing back a couple of cold ones, Etzel likely reasoned.
 
Etzel's Gold medal, his appearance on ABC's Good Morning America and the team finally capturing its first NCAA titles in 1983 and 1984 put the program in a much different light. In a state where there have historically been far more lasts than firsts, this was something to truly celebrate.
 
"Yeah, I think some people probably became more aware (of WVU rifle)," Etzel admitted.
 
However, he was still driving the van to matches, still taking his team to Wendy's to eat dinner and he still wasn't making any money.
 
Those facts were driven home later during the summer of '84 when he was invited to take part in an Olympic celebration in Charleston that also included women's gymnastics Gold-medal winner Mary Lou Retton, the daughter of WVU basketball player Ronnie Retton from nearby Fairmont. Mary Lou's amazing performance out in Los Angeles took the country by storm and turned her into an instant celebrity.
 
Wanting to capitalize on Retton's new-found fame, West Virginia politicians invited Mary Lou back to the Mountain State to get their pictures taken with her. A parade was arranged in her honor in downtown Charleston. Meanwhile, Etzel also was hastily added to the program.
 
"That was a pretty weird time," he recalled. "I still have the key to the city of Charleston somewhere, I think."
 
One of the local car dealerships in Charleston presented the-soon-to-be-16-year-old Retton with keys to a new red Corvette while Etzel sat and watched. He was still one of the few coaches on West Virginia's athletic staff who didn't have a courtesy car, and the vehicle he was driving at the time was in the shop being repaired which meant he had to bum rides to work.
 
Somehow, Mickey Furfari found out about Etzel's predicament and wrote about it the local paper.
 
"I was sitting there and a lot of people had some really good things to say, but I can't really describe how humiliating that was," he admitted. "I didn't expect anything, but I realized quickly that this was going to be a really strange trip."
 
Later that fall when Etzel was recognized by the University before a home football game, the students in unison chanted "buy him a car!" when he was presented with a certificate honoring him for his Olympic accomplishments earlier that summer. The students hadn't forgotten Mickey's column.
 
Soon afterward, he got his courtesy car.
 
"I remember that day distinctly because I didn't have anything to drive," he chuckled.
 
At any rate, the two national titles and Etzel earning a Gold medal in Los Angeles were clearly instrumental in elevating rifle's status, but there was another event Etzel points to that was of equal significance to the development of West Virginia University rifle - and perhaps even more important within the sport itself.
 
That occurred eight years prior when Etzel was able to get Swedish Olympian Stefan Thynell to shoot for the Mountaineers. Thynell competed in the 1976 Summer Olympic Games in Montreal and was considered one of the world's top shooters when he arrived in Morgantown in the fall of '76.
 
"He was kind of a ladies man," Jay Redmond, then a WVU student, chuckled. "You didn't really see that much from shooters."
 
College rifle's version of Chaz Michael Michaels - a target-devouring, feather-haired lady killer! Of course today, he is a nationally renowned mechanical engineering professor at Penn State University.
 
Former West Virginia coach Marsha Beasley, then shooting at East Tennessee State, remembers Thynell well.
 
"I was in college when Stefan was competing and I remember West Virginia having this shooter who was head and shoulders ahead of what anybody else was doing," she recalled. "He had an 1187 score before the targets changed and at the time he did that people back then were happy to be shooting in the 1160s.
 
"His score was just so far above what everybody else was shooting, and I can remember how phenomenal everyone thought it was," she added. "He did have an impact."
 
West Virginia never won a national title with Thynell, but his arrival in Morgantown sort of put WVU on a higher plane within the sport. Soon, world-class shooters such as John Rost, Bob Broughton, Dave Johnson, Mike Anti and Christian Heller found their way to West Virginia.
 
Then, one national title became two, and then three by 1986.
 
Johnson, a freshman on West Virginia's first NCAA championship team in '83, recalled the general atmosphere within the rifle program before the Mountaineers finally captured their first title.
 
"They had just come off a real traumatic year in '82 at nationals when they were really favored to win and they didn't," he said. "They had some personality conflicts and the team didn't perform well. A couple of those folks had moved on and when I came in the door I didn't have any connection to the past.
 
"I was just this young guy that had been in successful programs and wanted to be in one and I think Ed really helped me along that line," he said. "He knew enough about me and he kind of laid the ground work by departing from the past and having a fresh start."
 
"Teams can be teams and sometimes they are not," Etzel explained. "You can recruit four-star football players and four-star basketball players and it's not a team. It's just a group of people. I think most people got along - some people probably didn't - but I don't know how much relationships had an impact on how people performed.
 
"That team just kind of fell on its face and underachieved at the championships," he continued. "I remember one of those at West Point when they didn't do well when they started. They dug a hole and that's where they ended up."
 
But Etzel did change the culture in subtle ways, which was typically how he operated as a coach.
 
"Relationships did change. We recruited some different people," he admitted. "We had some people that discovered the team was doing well and they found a degree here that was meaningful to them and the vast majority of the people we had here were really, really good students.
 
"I assume we kind of figured out how to tune up what we needed to do and then for me to just get out of the way and let our athletes perform," Etzel stated. "That's something I learned. When I was coaching my best I was just getting out of the way of people and being supportive of them."
 
Etzel had turned West Virginia rifle into such a well-oiled operation in the mid-1980s that by 1989, when he was pursuing his doctorate degree in psychology, Greg Perrine was brought in for one year to run the team. 
 
He won an NCAA title that year as well.
 
"We were fortunate to get Greg to come back to finish his degree," Etzel said. "He was already in the pool business, and still is today, but he did that for one year. Greg knew the culture and he knew everybody, and then came Marsha, who was a highly organized and effective person."

Marsha Beasley Takes Over
 
When Etzel eventually decided to step away from coaching to teach full-time in the College of Physical Education, the first person he recommended for the WVU rifle position was Marsha Beasley.
 
She had no prior coaching experience and was working in Washington, D.C., in an administrative role within the sport before she was offered the sport's most coveted job. Marsha knew everybody who was anybody, was highly organized and was someone all of her colleagues regarded as a "doer."
 
And under Beasley rifle continued to win and win and win and win. Her teams secured eight national championships during a nine-year span from 1990 to 1998, falling short just once in 1994 when the Mountaineers lost the title to Alaska-Fairbanks.
 
It's one of the great periods of dominance in NCAA history in any sport, and nearly everything she needed to make it happen was already in place when she took over.
 
"When I started, Ed was so helpful to me and he was a huge part of our success because he was willing, literally, every day to let me bounce things off of him," she recalled. "And it may have just been, 'Who do I need to see about getting money for a trip?' He used to have his office in the Natatorium so I walked by his office every day and put my head in to talk to him.
 
"He didn't want anything out of it except for the success of the team."
 
Dave Johnson, whose post-WVU credentials included an 11-year stint as the U.S. Olympic rifle coach, overseeing the team during the 2004, 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games, as well as winning three NCAA Championships while coaching at Alaska-Fairbanks, always admired what Beasley had done at his alma mater from afar.
 
"She inherited a very strong program and looking back on it at first it was like, 'Oh yeah, she's winning because Ed had built a strong team,'" Johnson noted. "There is certainly some validity to that looking at those first couple of years, but then you look at her next several years when she recruited, managed and coached several national championship teams. Ed may have built the base, but Marsha certainly kept it going and even increased it."
 
By the late 1990s, however, there was some complacency with rifle's great success which led to a reduction in funding and support. Consequently, Beasley's teams eventually slipped to third at nationals in 1999, 2000 and 2001, and then to sixth in 2002 when budgetary issues were beginning to overtake the athletic department.
 
Institutionally, WVU was undergoing severe cutbacks as a result of reduced state funding, and the athletic department was among the units on campus asked to make cuts. Intensive, behind-the-scenes analysis was done on every sport, considering such things as fan interest, team success, profitability, sustainability and so forth, and rifle was one of the sports identified to be cut, just as it once was in 1980.
 
Even though rifle was by far the most successful sport at WVU, there were legitimate concerns within the athletic department that rifle was not going to continue to be a sponsored NCAA sport.
 
And those concerns were amplified nationally when West Virginia and Xavier dropped their programs. Johnson remembers that period well as USA rifle's head coach.
 
"It was a shock and it was a wakeup moment for the sport, for sure," he said. "At that same time frame, the sport was on old technology where we'd hang paper targets with bull's-eyes on them and shoot them, score them and it took a couple of hours to do that. It was not spectator friendly at all.
 
"So West Virginia dropping the program kind of hit a perfect storm," Johnson continued. "The technology had come along with electronic targets in the early 2000s to where they were finally able to use them at that distance."
 
Johnson, as the national coach, was asked to take over the NCAA championship for a year until the sport could find its bearings.
 
"They said, 'Hey, we need some help with the Olympic national governing body to sponsor and run the NCAAs,'" Johnson recalled. "We said yes and we also said from a longevity point of view that we wanted this done electronically, modernize it to the Olympic standard and change the event. And they did. It changed to how the Olympics were run with medal rounds and that all coincided around that same time West Virginia had got cut, so maybe it was a perfect storm of events for the sport."
 
Meanwhile, there also was a storm brewing in West Virginia. 
 
Political pressure forced the athletic department to reconsider its decision to drop rifle and the program was soon reinstated. After competing as a club sport in 2004, rifle returned as an intercollegiate sport in 2005.
 
A $100,000 line item appropriated by the state Legislature initially provided the funding for the rifle program, but the money could not be used until four years-worth of equity had been built up to help sustain the costs of running the program in the future.
 
That meant that Beasley didn't have scholarship aid to offer top shooters and she also had to reduce her role to part-time status to help keep the team's tight budget in line. As a result, her records slipped to 3-8 and then to 4-7 before she decided to step away following the 2006 season to concentrate on raising her young family.

Another Revival
 
By bowing out gracefully, Beasley felt that was the best opportunity for her successor to have a clean slate. Jon Hammond, a member of Beasley's team when it was cut in 2004, was hired to take over the program in 2007.
 
"When Jon took over he had a big challenge and I remember thinking if anyone can make it work he can do it because he's so charming," Beasley said. "But I didn't know for sure that he would and I'm thrilled that he has."
 
Hammond, like Etzel years before, initially viewed coaching the WVU rifle team as a means to an end. In Etzel's case, it was a way to continue his education and pursue his academic endeavors. For Hammond, it was an opportunity to keep competing with an eye on the 2012 Olympics in London.
 
"I was in school for two years, I worked at Pete Dye for the golf tournament for a couple of years and sort of selfishly, my motivation initially was I could start shooting again," he said. "I would have a job where I am earning a living, but the facility was right here and there was no reason I couldn't start training full-time and the schedule worked out great to where if I wanted to compete internationally it's in the summer when the students aren't here. I can combine that with recruiting and competing at the international level was only going to help me as a coach."
 
There were couple of things that really aided Hammond at the outset of his coaching tenure.
 
One, his cell phone was full of valuable contacts that could help him get in touch with some of the best shooters in the world and, two, he had complete roster flexibility just one year after taking over the program.
 
He didn't have any scholarship money tied up in mediocre shooters that he would have to honor so he was able to go out and rebuild the program quickly. And he didn't have to do it in piecemeal fashion.
 
"I was really lucky because my first recruiting class, while there were better teams that my kids could have gone to, the one kid who was probably my top recruit, Tommy Santelli, was from Washington, Pennsylvania. Then we got a girl from West Virginia, Brandi Eskew, who was also a top-10 recruit," Hammond said.
 
"Then we got Kyle Smith from Pennsylvania and then Andy Lamson … all four were good recruits," he continued. "Once Tommy and Brandi were coming the other two were like, 'Okay, there are some good shooters there again so we can build something.'"
 
Soon afterward, Hammond got standout shooter Bryant Wallizer to transfer from Murray State and then came Michael Kulbacki and Justin Pentz and immediately the entire atmosphere changed.
 
"Suddenly, we had a deep core within the team again," Hammond said.
 
This is the group that made the huge comeback on the second day to defeat Kentucky by a mere five shots to win the 2009 National Championship, Hammond's first and West Virginia's 13^th.
 
"We were fortunate to win that one," he admitted. "We were in the right place at the right time and after that, we could compete for any of the top recruits again."
 
Hammond landed two of the most outstanding shooters in school history, two-time world champion Nicco Campriani from Florence, Italy, and Bolzano, Italy's Petra Zublasing, a three-time NCAA champion.
 
Surprisingly, WVU didn't win a national championship during Campriani's two seasons competing for the Mountaineers in 2010 and 2011, but like Thynell, his presence attracted other outstanding shooters which led to a run of five straight NCAA titles beginning in 2013 and ending last year when they finished second to Kentucky.
 
Hammond's six, plus Beasley's eight, Etzel's four and Perrine's one gives West Virginia 19 NCAA championships. Including the four NRA titles, that's 23 total national championships for WVU rifle.
 
Oklahoma State wrestling has the most NCAA titles with 31, followed by USC men's outdoor track and field with 25. Then comes Denver skiing with 24, North Carolina women's soccer and USC men's tennis with 21 each, and Arkansas men's indoor track and field with 20.
 
After that, it's West Virginia rifle and UCLA men's volleyball sitting seventh all-time with 19.
 
Connecticut women's basketball, which we hear about incessantly these days, still has eight to go to catch West Virginia and UCLA.
 
If you think about it, a lot of the NCAA's recent dynasties were accomplished by one person, such as John Wooden at UCLA, Geno Auriemma's phenomenal run at UConn or Pat Summit's amazing tenure at Tennessee.
 
West Virginia rifle's success has been a collaborative effort, going all the way back to its inception in 1951. Eight different coaches have contributed to WVU's 23 national rifle titles - four different coaches since 1980 alone when the NCAA first took over the sport.
 
Jon Hammond now sits in the perch within the sport, just as Marsha Beasley once did in the 1990s and as Ed Etzel did in the 1980s.

The Future
 
Today, rifle is by no means a growing sport. According to Johnson, now semi-retired and assisting Launi Meili at the Air Force Academy, there are 32 teams competing in NCAA rifle. That's down from when he competed at WVU in the early 1980s, but he said that number seems to be holding steady right now.
 
Don't forget, NCAA rifle still serves as the sport's primary feeder system for the U.S. Olympic Team, which means eliminating it would deliver a fatal blow to shooting's Olympic developmental system. 
 
And of course, rifle's gold medals count just like the other ones during the Olympics. 
 
"I hope we're stable," Beasley said, who herself got back into coaching a couple of years ago at Ole Miss and is now beginning to experience some success there.
 
Mike Anti (Navy) and Web Wright (Army West Point) are other head coaches with WVU ties, along with Dan Hermsmeier at Memphis. Jean-Pierre Lucas is Beasley's assistant at Ole Miss. 
 
That's a pretty impressive West Virginia University coaching tree within the sport.
 
Next spring, all of them could very well be back in Morgantown for the 2019 NCAA Championships because for the first time in school history the WVU Coliseum is going to be the host site for the event. 
 
It will be the reunion of reunions for West Virginia University rifle, which will be seeking its 20^thNCAA title.
 
This is happening on campus because of the new mobile rifle range West Virginia University was able to purchase as a result of a generous donation made by former Mountaineer kicker Bill McKenzie, who most Mountaineer fans remember for his last-second field goal to upset Pitt in 1975.
 
In the eyes of those passionate about West Virginia University rifle, McKenzie's gift is yet another important milestone in the great history the program continues to write. 
 
It clearly demonstrates West Virginia University's firm commitment to its most successful athletic program - which also happens to be one of the most successful programs in NCAA history.
 
"Athletics is obviously a much different beast than it was long ago so it was a very different experience, but nevertheless there were a lot of people through the years that were quite helpful," Etzel noted. "They used to ask me what I did as a rifle coach. 'Well, I drive the van.' It was a very low-budget deal. We had less than $5,000 to operate the entire team. But the door of opportunity opened for me and I took that opportunity and it turned into something that was completely unpredictable.
 
"I'm proud of the people's efforts who supported us and the athletes who put a lot of time into it, too," Etzel continued. "We were kind of in the right place at the right time and we got just enough to keep the thing rolling and growing. I'm pleased with what happened, but I really didn't have any master plan for anything. I just showed up. In the end, I still wore the hat of driving the van … and nobody got killed with me driving it. 
 
"We ran off the road a couple of times, but everyone survived."
 
Etzel added wryly, "Somebody once was asked what's the key to success? 'Well, take about 30-some years of your life, work about 10 to 15 hours a day and success just drops into your lap.' I'm being a little snarky but it's that kind of thing. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had a good work ethic, and I learned pretty quickly how to work with people."
 
Things we West Virginians can clearly identify with, for sure.