UAF athlete talks perfect score on college rifle’s biggest stage

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTVF) - Moments before she became the second-ever rifle athlete to record a perfect 600 at the NCAA Championships, University of Alaska (UAF) shooter Elli Spencer took a beat.

Readying for her final shot, Spencer turned to her coaches.

“I looked at them, and said, ‘I’m going to take a dry fire,’” the Nanook told Newscenter Fairbanks in an interview.

A dry fire is a practice shot. It doesn’t count toward an official score. But for Spencer, it did count, just in a different way.

“The dry fire was actually really awful. When I took it, it wasn’t good. It would have been a nine if it was a real shot,” she said.

She wasn’t discouraged. In fact, the less-than-ideal practice shot delivered the opposite effect.

“After that, I was comfortable, calmed down a little bit. It grounded me a little bit,” she said.

Spencer explained the would-be nine set down a crucial guideline. She’d shot 10s, knew what they felt like. But that dry fire gave her a sense of what physical and mental variables could lead her final shot awry.

“So I was able to take that 10 with a very clear head,” she said. And she did.

Only Rylan Kissell, a former UAF rifle athlete, had ever shot a perfect 600 at college rifle’s biggest stage. That was in 2023. One year later, Kissell now shares the bragging right with Spencer, a freshman from Boise, Idaho.

Spencer’s spotless performance came on the second day of the competition. Her positive showing, along with multiple other 590-plus rounds from her teammates, also pushed the Nanooks toward an outcome of more than bragging rights.

The Nanooks smallbore round on the day before, March 8, didn’t gone according to plan. The NCAA Champions for 2023, UAF found themselves in fourth going into the final day of 2024′s competition, the air rifle round.

“I knew a 600 in air gun was a very doable score for me,” Spencer said.

Proving her precision and accuracy, Spencer and her team’s Saturday air rifle scores lifted them above third-place Kentucky and onto the podium, the Nanooks putting up a composite score of 4,719 to the Wildcats 4,718.

Though not the finish the defending champions might have sought, the razor-thin margin let the Nanooks bring bronze back to Interior Alaska.

Wrapping up her first year at UAF, Spencer said neither her 600 nor the third-place spot at the NCAA Championships give her a “job done” mentality.

The goal isn’t one good performance. The goal, she said, is “taking that [match] with me and building on top of that, so my air gun matches moving forward very much so model after this one.”

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