Parlier High student is on target, becomes national shooting champion

It was the culmination of two years of practice involving hundreds of hours of shooting: Parlier High School senior Cassandra Rodriguez was named winner of the 2016 National JROTC Three-Position National Championship.

After coming in second at the 2014 national competition, Rodriguez was determined to have the top spot. The second-place finish instilled in Rodriguez, 18, a commitment to improving her skills as a marksman.

“Being so close at that point – I just really wanted to get first place,” she said.

On April 7, Parlier Unified School District held a celebration at Parlier High for Rodriguez’s victory, said Edward Lucero, the district’s superintendent. Rodriguez is the highest-scoring shooter from Parlier since the high school’s air rifle program began several years ago.

Rodriguez had been interested in guns and weaponry from an early age, recalling how she would visit her male cousins and make homemade weapons out of bricks, sticks, needles and other materials when she was younger.

For Rodriguez, who enlisted in the Marines around her 18th birthday three months ago, marksmanship and JROTC was a natural path.

“They (the Naval JROTC) came in for an orientation when I was in eighth grade and they showed us a slide show of things that they do in ROTC, and one of things that interested me was rifles, just because I have an interest in firearms,” Rodriguez said.

“The first few times I shot the rifle, it was just because it was fun,” she said. “After my second year, I qualified to go to national championships after regional championships and I won second place. I was like, ‘Wow, I can really shoot.’ ”

Following that competition, Rodriguez pursued rifle with a renewed determination, said Mark Bristol, Rodriguez’s coach and the senior naval science instructor at Parlier High.

“She’s practiced twice a day, over the holidays, over spring break, over Christmas,” Bristol said. “She practices so much – she really committed herself to this.”

But the lifelong Central Valley resident faced a challenge when she ended up not placing in the top 20 at the 2015 competition.

“My junior year, I think it was just the nerves that got to me,” Rodriguez said. “I was really nervous and every shot threw me off – I’d get upset over it and at the end of the day, I’d gotten 25th place.”

Steely concentration a key

The competition has two groups of shooters, sporter and precision, Bristol said. Precision shooters are allowed special equipment that generally results in higher scores, while sporter shooters, which is how Rodriguez competes, are just allowed to hold the rifle.

Rodriguez’s road to being the national champion began at the JROTC Postal Competition in October, where nearly 7,500 participants shot at their home ranges and submitted their targets to be scored. Rodriguez qualified and moved on to the Regional Service Championships in Provo, Utah, where she competed against other Navy JROTC students.

Each score is out of 600 and the scores are electronically calculated based on the marks made by each shot on the target, Bristol said.

Around 220 shooters from all JROTC services went to the national competition in Anniston, Alabama, from March 17-19.

The competition is a 3x20 contest, meaning that each shooter will take 20 shots from three different positions. The three positions are standing, kneeling and in the prone position, or lying down flat on one’s stomach.

“And it’s in a timed limit,” Bristol said. “You have 20 minutes for prone, 25 minutes for standing and 20 minutes for kneeling.”

Bristol said mastering each position is crucial to succeeding as a rifleman.

“Every time you get into position and you move, you change your line of sight, your sight of picture changes,” Bristol said. “So you have to be able to get back into exactly the same position every time.”

“It doesn’t look like it’s hard because if you have someone like Cassandra, who can shoot really well – she gets into position very easily, she sets up very easily,” Bristol said. “So it looks like it’s really simple, but it takes a lot of concentration.”

Rodriguez said a flower headband she wears when she shoots is meant to throw off her competitors’ concentration. “I use it to play mind games with other competitors,” she said. “Guys don’t expect a girl with a flower headband to be much of a challenge so they let their guard down and end up not doing as well.”

Rodriguez said marksmanship involves mental as well as physical discipline.

“I think patience is the biggest part of it,” Rodriguez said. “You also need to not feel as much, because if you let your emotions get in front of you when you’re trying to focus at the same time, one of them is going to take over. And it’s usually emotions.”

When Rodriguez finished shooting in Alabama, she was anxious about her final score.

“Honestly, I thought I was going to get third, maybe second, because I wasn’t doing so good in the finals,” she said. “So, they called third place and I was getting kind of nervous. I thought, ‘If I’m not second, then I probably didn’t place.’

“They ended up calling my name for first and I was just shocked, just really overwhelmed,” Rodriguez said. “I had worked so hard for this and I’m actually getting what I put into it.”

This story was originally published April 10, 2016 at 4:16 PM with the headline "Parlier High student is on target, becomes national shooting champion."