LU Shooting Team starts off with a blast

While visiting Liberty University during his son’s move-in last summer, club shooting head coach Dave Hartman noticed a lack of adequate shooting ranges for his son to train at.

Hartman sent emails asking when Liberty would be getting a shooting team, but his questions seemed to get nowhere. That is, until he sent another email saying he was going to be on campus.

“My reason for asking was twofold,” Hartman said. “So that my son would have a team to shoot on, but number two — if there was going to be the start of a team, I was going to offer any of my contacts, anything that I knew that I could send this way to help with the formation of the team.”

It was not long before Hartman received an email from the director of club sports, Kirk Handy, with an unexpected message.

“I had no idea I’d be coaching it,” Hartman said. “I had a career back home, I was successful doing that. All I was doing at the moment was offering my services to give any information and help in that way from a long distance.”

But then Hartman had a chance encounter by email with Kirk Handy, the director of Club Sports. They met, and just an hour after parting ways, Hartman was given a call that Brad Butler, who works with Planning and Construction, wanted to meet with him.

“He told me he was going to ask Jerry (Falwell) for $1.5 million to build this range,” Hartman said.

Several days later, he was notified that the $1.5 million proposal was shot down. They were instead receiving $3 million.

They stayed in touch until Hartman came back during Thanksgiving Break.

“A month later they offered me the position I have now,” Hartman said. “I saw I could have a positive influence on these kids, so I accepted.”

In January, when most players decide where they are going to continue their shooting career, Hartman had a sense of urgency to recruit.

“A lot of the seeds I started sowing were not just for kids coming this last year, but I was talking to kids as young as eighth graders,” Hartman said.

Though late in the recruiting game, Hartman was hopeful that current Liberty students would be interested in joining.

“I didn’t know what to think at the time,” Hartman said of his early expectations for the team. “The season started very well. I was pleasantly surprised of the quality of the competitiveness of our athletes here. The one thing I can say about our entire group is that they are very eager and that they are very easy to train.”

Hartman said that one of the biggest adversities the team faced throughout the season was weather.

“Weather dictated the speed at which we built the range,” Hartman said. “(And) the speed at which the team was able to train.”

However, the team is on an upward trend. This past fall, they competed in Division IV and will be going to Division III, depending on the size of the team.

“It’s going to be a much more competitive arena,” Hartman said. “We have an opportunity to send people to the Junior Olympic Qualifiers and potentially to the Junior Olympics. That is a tangible goal now that we have this field.”