At 8 a.m. on a Saturday, while most of Oxford was still shaking off Friday night, a dozen or so shooters lay prone on a 12-point range about ten minutes from campus and began the 2026-27 college rifle season. The No. 5 Ole Miss rifle team hosted No. 14 Ohio State and No. 18 UT Martin at the Ole Miss Rifle Center, and by the time the last target was scored, the Rebels had swept both opponents with a 4711 aggregate. Ohio State finished second at 4651, UT Martin third at 4597.
It is, by any measure, one of the strangest spectator sports in the NCAA, and one of the most accessible. Admission is free. There is no stadium roar, no marching band, no tailgate. There is an observation area for spectators, electronic scoring targets that flash results almost instantly, and a silence so complete you can hear a pellet settle into the ten-ring. For anyone who has never watched a collegiate rifle match, the season opener is an unusually good place to start, because the sport's biggest name was on the firing line.
That name is Audrey Gogniat. The Swiss shooter from Le Noirmont is the two-time defending NCAA individual air rifle champion, and she is the reason this otherwise under-the-radar opener carried real weight. Gogniat won her first national air rifle title in 2025 in Lexington, edging Kentucky's Braden Peiser in a tiebreaker after entering the final with a 600-58X. She defended it in March 2026 at Ohio State's Covelli Center, rallying late to beat Nebraska freshman Katlyn Sullivan in a final that came down to the last shot.
The path to that second title was anything but smooth. Gogniat opened the 2026 NCAA Championship by leading the field after both air rifle relays with a 600-54X, the fourth perfect air rifle score of her career. With it, she became just the second woman and the third person ever to post four perfect scores in NCAA air rifle competition, and she has now done it in back-to-back seasons at both the Patriot Rifle Conference Championship and the NCAA Championship. In the final itself, she trailed by as many as two points before a costly miss by Sullivan let her surge ahead. Earlier in the same final she had survived a tight battle with West Virginia's Griffin Lake, pulling ahead on her 22nd shot to stay in the hunt.
Gogniat arrived in Oxford with a resume that already set her apart. She is an Olympic bronze medalist, having taken third in the women's 10-meter air rifle at the Paris 2024 Games, and she is the lone Olympic medalist among Ole Miss's more than 500 active student-athletes. She came to Mississippi from a village in the canton of Jura, nearly 5,000 miles and up to a 17-hour flight from home, having never visited the small college town before she moved in just before classes began in mid-August 2024. Her father's influence drew her into the sport as a child; the rest is a rapid ascent that has made her the face of a program that has quietly become one of the best in the country.
Against Ohio State and UT Martin, Gogniat picked up where she left off. She led all shooters with an 1186 aggregate, claiming the top individual spot in both smallbore and air rifle. In smallbore she set the pace with a 591, shooting at least 98 in each of her six series, including a 197 in kneeling, a 198 in prone and a 196 in standing. The Rebels swept the top three aggregate spots, with junior Gracie Dinh second at 1180 and Jordan de Jesus third at 1178. Senior Regan Diamond placed fifth overall with an 1166.
Ole Miss posted a 2337 in smallbore and a 2374 in air rifle, outscoring both opponents in each discipline and occupying the top four individual spots in smallbore and the top six in air rifle. The match also offered a first look at the team's newcomers. Freshman Kamdyn McFarland, a Billings, Montana, native competing outside the counter lineup in her collegiate debut, fired a 589 to finish second in smallbore, opening with a 197 in kneeling and a 198 in prone before closing with a 194 in standing. The Rebels also added freshman Avana Harford to the roster this season.
The win extended a lopsided recent history with the Buckeyes. Ole Miss now leads the all-time series 5-1, having won five straight since a loss in the teams' first meeting in January 2018. The largest margin of victory in that series came in this very match, a 4711-4651 decision. The smallest was a 4711-4708 nail-biter in Columbus in November 2024. Ohio State, coached by Ryan Tanoue, was led on the day by sophomore Mackenzie Pruden, who posted a 1168 aggregate and a 581 in smallbore, and by freshman Ally Wodka, whose 588 paced the Buckeyes in air rifle. The trip to Oxford was Ohio State's first since Ole Miss joined the Patriot Rifle Conference.
UT Martin, meanwhile, was making its first appearance against Ole Miss since the 2022-23 season. The Skyhawks are led by Alayna Walther, a former UT Martin shooter who was named interim head coach in April 2025 after MJ Vowell retired following eight seasons at the helm. Walther, an Avella, Pennsylvania, native, won seven combined All-Ohio Valley Conference postseason awards during her own Skyhawk career from 2021 to 2025 and topped UT Martin in scoring 22 times in smallbore and 14 times in air rifle across 46 career matches. Junior Sophia Ashford and sophomore Olivia Harvey are among the team's key returners as UT Martin works to replace graduate Joey Kovach.
For Ole Miss, the opener was the first step in a season with unusually high expectations. The Rebels went 10-2 in 2025-26 and are seeking a seventh consecutive NCAA Championship appearance. Under head coach Will Shaner, who took over ahead of the 2025-26 season after two years as an assistant, Ole Miss won the first national smallbore team title in program history, edging TCU by two points with a 2356-142X, and finished third overall as a team. Shaner, a Kentucky graduate, is the youngest head coach in program history and a Tokyo 2020 Olympic gold medalist in men's 10-meter air rifle. In his first season the Rebels also reached the No. 1 national ranking for the first time since 2023, on November 17.
The program itself dates to 1996 and has competed in the Patriot Rifle Conference since departing the Great America Rifle Conference in 2024. The PRC was established in 2013 for schools that sponsor rifle teams but do not have rifle as a sponsored sport in their primary conferences. Ole Miss's home range, the Patricia C. Lamar National Guard Readiness Center, was completed in 2004 as a joint project between the university and the City of Oxford, a partnership that echoes the one that built Swayze Field in 1989. Located at the intersection of State Route 7 and Sisk Avenue, it houses a 12-point range, a team meeting room and locker room, an arms room, and that observation area for spectators, and it is widely regarded as one of the premier collegiate rifle facilities in the United States.
The Rebels also added a new assistant coach this season in Sara Karasova, who spent 2025-26 as a graduate assistant at Memphis. Karasova competed at Alaska Fairbanks, graduating in 2025 with 12 All-America honors and helping the Nanooks win the 2023 NCAA team championship.
What the opener ultimately offered was a reminder of how narrow the margin is at the top of the sport. Gogniat's 1186 aggregate was superb, but the difference between a national champion and a runner-up can be a single shot, as her own NCAA final proved. The Rebels will carry that knowledge through a schedule that includes Memphis and Nebraska in October, a trip to Air Force, a home date with Georgia Southern, road matches at TCU and West Virginia, and the long build toward the NCAA Championships in March. For anyone curious enough to walk into the range on a Saturday morning, the season is just getting started, and the best shooter in the country is right there in front of you, free of charge.