Photo by Hannah Morgan White/Ole Miss Athletics
Ole Miss Rifle coach Rachel Martin, in her second season with the Rebels, has led the team to its fifth straight NCAA Championship appearance. The NCAA Rifle Championships take place from March 14-15 in Lexington, Ky.
Growing up in Peralta, N.M., Martin showed dairy goats with 4-H, a youth engagement organization. Her dad coached the 4-H air rifle program and made Martin and her two sisters go to practices.
“I actually really genuinely did not like (rifle) at first because I was very bad and had very little talent for it; I really couldn’t grasp it,” Martin said. “But I think I quite enjoyed that challenge. So then I kept shooting through high school.”
She attended the University of Nebraska on a rifle scholarship and was a dominant athlete for the Cornhuskers. Martin won an individual NCAA Championship in smallbore in 2015 and earned seven All-American honors from 2014-17. Additionally, she led Nebraska to four consecutive Top Eight team finishes.
“There were a lot of times where I wasn’t the best shooter on the range,” Martin said. “But I was the most irritating in the sense of I kept showing up. You couldn’t get rid of me.”
She graduated in 2017 and moved to Colorado Springs to train at the United States Olympic Training Center. She represented the USA in seven World Cups and won seven national championships.
“We (the Rifle World Cup) don’t get quite as much attention for it as soccer does. But it really was an honor to be able to go and do that and to qualify so many times,” Martin said. “And there was one that I remember I really did well in. I won gold in women’s smallbore, and that’s a feeling that you never forget.”
In 2018, she was the assistant coach for the Army West Point Rifle team. She helped the Black Knights finish sixth in the NCAA Championship.
After her lone season with Army, Martin returned to Nebraska as the head coach for two years. She led the Huskers to two NCAA Championship appearances.
Martin left Nebraska to take the assistant coach job at Ole Miss in 2022.
“I shot for Nebraska in college, and it really was a great program. I worked with some amazing people,” Martin said. “It was a great, great job. I really like Lincoln, but I kind of wanted something different and a little new.”
Martin had been in Lincoln for six years before coming to Oxford. Ole Miss pursued Martin in high school, but she declined due the subpar rifle program Ole Miss had at the time.
“I vaguely remembered liking Oxford and remembering everyone was really nice. It was a beautiful city,” Martin said. “So I actually took the job here without coming, because I was living in Scotland at the time, doing a degree there.”
Outside of rifle, the coach’s interests lie in studying national security. Martin is a student at Missouri State University pursuing a doctorate degree in defense and strategic studies with an emphasis in ethical warfare. In college, she specialized in Islamic terrorism.
“Sometimes I ask myself why I’m doing it. It’s because it is pretty hard, but I really enjoy it,” Martin said. “And because I’m not competing anymore, I am still very competitive, and I really like to try things that I don’t think I’m going to be good at and work hard to then be good at it.”
She also conducts research on various topics of global importance and presents her discoveries to conferences.
“I did one — a recent project — on energy security, which I knew nothing about, and I thought it was really boring. But actually it’s really fascinating,” Martin said. “I think it’s very important to be realistic of the situation that we are in.”
Martin spends a lot of time balancing being a student and a coach, on top of planning her wedding in May.
“We have morning practices, and then, I’ll go to the office. But (after work), I just go home and study,” Martin said. “That’s really my life right now, and then I’m getting married in May. So (planning) that also has been a part of my life which I didn’t realize how difficult that was.”
Martin gives all the credit for Ole Miss Rifle’s success to her team.
“They make it pretty easy because they’re a really good group of girls,” Martin said. “We’ve been very picky on recruiting and the type of individuals that we want to bring on to the team. … This year shows how that really does pay off in the long run.”
