Loveland High School air rifle team headed to national championship – Loveland

The Loveland High School JROTC Air Rifle Team has qualified for and will attend the Civilian Marksmanship Program JROTC Service National Championships this week in Port Clinton, Ohio.

The team, which practices in the JROTC room at Loveland High School, consists of five high school students who consistently score highest shooting from three positions: standing, kneeling and prone.

The trip, as well as the 15 of the team’s 19 rifles, were paid for by the U.S. Army, according to AJ Johnson, the JROTC instructor.

The team itself, sporting matching olive-colored hoodies Monday afternoon at their last practice before leaving for Ohio, is made up of four seniors and a sophomore between the ages of 16 and 18. Although they compete as Loveland High School, high schoolers from anywhere in the Thompson School District can join.

The sport allows both male and female shooters to compete together.

“It’s one sport where your size or your gender don’t matter,” Johnson said.

Danika Eisentraut, a 17 year-old senior and the team’s only female member, uses the same kind of rifle at the same 10-meter distance as her male peers, pointing out that the only noticeable difference between her targets and theirs was that her standing target, mounted at the shooter’s eye level, was slightly lower.

“Because I’m a shorty,” Eisentraut said, rolling her eyes.

The team began as a club, approved in 2014 amid what Johnson remembers as some controversy, and has grown since then to include a competitive varsity team and an available elective class for new shooters that this semester includes 17 students across three high schools. Many of the students were drawn to the sport through JROTC, because they have military family members or because they plan on enlisting after high school.

The team plans to move from Loveland High School to Mountain View High School next year, Johnson said, which will give the program more room to practice and store equipment.

Safety measures include trigger and muzzle control, rigorous safety examinations that have to be completed yearly, and “clear barrel indicators,” or CBI’s, long hunter-orange wires that are fed down the muzzle of the rifle whenever it is not in use to confirm that the weapon isn’t loaded. Additionally, Johnson said that in order to qualify for the team, his students must maintain a 2.9 grade-point-average and cannot be failing any classes.

In addition to in-person competitions like the one in Ohio, the team can also compete virtually from their classroom in Loveland High School, like they recently did against a team in Germany. Results are scanned by a computer program during these “postal” matches in real time to allow the shooters to go head-to-head against teams from all over the world.

The in-person competitions, the students said, have more of a golf tournament atmosphere than most other high school sports — no cheering or clapping, just the sound of the air rifles popping and pellets hitting their targets.

Between rounds of practice shooting, the team chatted among themselves about their upcoming trip. Hats were allowed, they said, much to the satisfaction of Ryan Cajka, the group’s only sophomore, who was wearing a green hat with a camouflaged American flag patch ironed on. Shoes were required, frustrating Eisentraut, who prefers to shoot in socks, and listening to music during the competition was prohibited.

If given the opportunity, said Will Fritz, a 17-year-old senior, it would be easy to choose a genre.

“Hard rock,” he said with a grin.