It all started with a polo shirt. In 2017, Siarra Crum was interviewing for an internship at Mount Aloysius College with Kevin Kime, the athletic director at the school while wearing a polo shirt with the Morehead State University rifle team logo on it.
Although she grew up in nearby Portage, Pennsylvania, Crum was a student at Morehead State in Kentucky, because there were no colleges in Pennsylvania that had a rifle team. She had shot competitively on her high school team and at Portage Revolver and Pistol Club, and wanted to continue to shoot at the collegiate level. At Morehead State, Crum was named to the Collegiate Rifle Coaches Association’s Scholastic All-American Team her freshman and sophomore years and, as a senior, she qualified for the 2019 NCAA National Air Rifle Championship.
Not long after Crum’s internship, a student at Mount Aloysius, Elissa Barron, also had a conversation with Kime about competitive rifle teams. Barron had shot competitively while she was in high school and hoped to continue in college.
In January 2024, Mount Aloysius announced that it would become the only college in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to field an NCAA rifle team, naming Crum as the Mounties’ first head rifle coach. When the school announced the formation of the team, John McKeegan, the president of Mount Aloysius, said in a statement that the college saw a need to be filled.
“There are 54 high school rifle teams across the Commonwealth, 20 of which are in Cambria or the surrounding six counties,” McKeegan said. “Pennsylvania students who want to continue to participate in a sport they love in college currently have to look out of state, or to opt to not compete. With the launch of this new Mountie team, we are addressing a community need.”
Mount Aloysius is a private Catholic college in Cresson, Pennsylvania, and an NCAA Division III school. However, under the NCAA structure for rifle conferences, the Mounties compete against an array of institutions including Division I powerhouses like Ohio State University and the University of Kentucky. The college competes as a member of the Mid-Atlantic Rifle Conference (MAC), which features 10 NCAA and collegiate club rifles programs located throughout the Northeast and in Texas.
Coach Crum started with two Mount Aloysius students on the new rifle team: Barron and Sydney Castel, who competed at the same high school that Crum had attended. To build a team, she had to recruit three more members. She attended the Pennsylvania High School State Rifle Tournament where she met Samantha Hayman, Molly Miller and Kayla Trinkle.
“I went there for a weekend, and luckily, I found those three girls there that were willing to jump on our team and have faith in me as a coach,” she said.
The team made its competitive debut in October 2024 with a match at Ohio State. Although they didn’t win the competition, Mount Aloysius did launch a successful season. While it is an all-women team, they compete in co-ed matches, as rifle is one of the few collegiate sports where men and women compete against each other.
In March 2025, the five members of the Mounties rifle team competed in their first Mid-Atlantic Rifle Conference Championship, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The team won both the air rifle and smallbore competitions, which resulted in the Mounties clinching the overall championship with the highest aggregate score.
Several of the Mounties were awarded individual honors as well. Trinkle, who finished as the top shooter in both disciplines, was named the 2025 MAC Athlete of the Year and Top Individual Aggregate Champion. Miller was awarded the Achievement Award in air rifle. Barron, Miller and Trinkle were all named First Team All-Conference in both air rifle and smallbore, while Castel was named Second Team All-Conference in air rifle. Samantha Hayman earned All-MAC Rookie Team honors in both events and was joined by Castel in smallbore.
So, how does a fledgling team that has competed in only a handful of matches become the conference champions and have multiple athletes win recognition? Coach Crum gives credit to the college and the student-athletes.
“I have great support from our staff, our president of the university, our athletic director—they have been really behind me in getting this rolling,” she said. “I’ve been lucky to find a great group of girls this first year that put in the hard work to get where we’re at. If it wasn’t for them, I don’t think we would have had a great year. So, I really give them all the praise and everything for putting in the hard work on the range and to winning our championship—it was all up to the five girls this year.”
Hard work translates to spending lot of time on the range. The team practices at the Portage Revolver and Pistol Club, where team members can be found each weeknight honing their skills.
Kayla Trinkle, a freshman at Mount Aloysius, began shooting when she was in the sixth grade. She shot on a club team and on the Southern Lehigh High School team. Trinkle wanted to continue her shooting career in college but could not afford to attend an out-of-state university. So, when she learned that Mount Aloysius was starting a team, she was excited to contact the coach. A psychology major on a pre-med track, Trinkle has excelled as a Mountie—both academically and on the rifle team.
“It’s a very academics-first program, which is beneficial in the long run,” she said.
While the 2024-2025 season has concluded, Coach Crum said that she is already working on recruiting student-athletes for the team next year. An all-women team this season, Crum also revealed that she is having conversations with some men to join the team as well.
The Mounties’ first year in rifle competition was a tremendous success and Crum’s goal is to continue that into the future.
“Definitely, our short-term goal right now is building the program, getting a bigger roster, getting our name out there more so it can open the opportunities for bringing more student-athletes to our campus. I would love one day to see one of our girls or one of our athletes shooting at the NCAA championship,” she said. “I would love to see one of our athletes shooting on that big stage.”
Crum said her goal is to continuously improve in both smallbore and air rifle. She added that she enjoys the challenge of competition and self-improvement.
“I enjoy that it is just you against yourself on the line, and it really is just a mental sport. I just enjoy getting in the zone where it’s just you and your gun,” Crum said.
Both Crum and Trinkle said they would encourage girls to shoot rifle competitively, though some young women may find it to be outside of their comfort zone.
“I would tell them to do it and to not get discouraged, because as coach said, the men can be a little, I’d say, overwhelming. My home teams, both high school and club, were all men. I was the only female and it was difficult, with their mindsets compared to my mindset of the sport, which was just very different. But I’d say definitely push through that, because once you get out of that scene, it’s a lot better,” Trinkle explained.
For Trinkle, and the other members of the team, staying the course has resulted in championship awards in their first year. It will be fun to see how the team grows and improves in the future and to see them wearing Mount Aloysius College rifle team polo shirts to their own interviews.
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