The Ohio State pistol team was already a dynasty, but the trophies just don't stop rolling in for the program year-over-year.
Less than two months removed from a title win in the first 12-team College Football Playoff, a Buckeye athletics squad has captured another national championship thanks to the OSU pistol team securing the highest honor in its sport for a fifth straight year.
The title also marks the sixth for Ohio State since 2018, which was the second season under current head coach Emil Milev. A year before arriving in Columbus, Milev became just the second U.S. Olympic shooter at the time to qualify for six different Olympic events. He also won the silver medal in the rapid fire pistol competition on behalf of Bulgaria at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
Now, Milev has successfully overseen six national titles at Ohio State within just eight years of each other. The program has also captured 10 total titles in the sport since 2000.
The Buckeyes have not only won several of these team titles outright, but continue to do so in dominant fashion. Ohio State finished with an aggregate score of 4476 this year, which was over 125 points higher than second-place Navy. Last year, OSU beat the Midshipmen by a whopping 296 points to win the championship, while the margin between Navy and fifth-place Citadel ended at merely 233 points.
Ohio State saw six of its student-athletes finish with top 10 individual aggregate scores, including four in the top five and each of the top two. Marcus Klemp posted the highest individual aggregate score with a total of 1140 points, while teammate Blaine Simpson trailed him by only 19 points on aggregate but won the sports pistol competition outright with the highest tally of 569 points — one more than Klemp.
Abbie Leverett, Riya Salian, Jonathan Doresten and Evan Langerak rounded out the performances for the Buckeyes that finished among the top 10 for the national championship. Klemp also finished second overall in the individual air pistol competition.
As winter and spring sports prepare to head into respective postseasons in the coming months, the other teams representing Ohio State athletics will look to follow the standard set by the football and pistol programs early in the 2025 year.
