The NCAA Rifle Committee is proposing a shoot-off to break ties in championships competition instead of declaring winners based on a compilation of previous shots.

The proposal is one of two significant actions emerging from the committee’s recent meeting in Indianapolis. The other would give coaches more flexibility in designating which shooters’ scores are counted in regular-season matchups. Both will be forwarded to the Division I Championships Cabinet for consideration. If accepted, they would most likely go into effect during 2011-12.

The shoot-off would add more excitement to the championships and increase the sport’s spectator appeal, said Paul Klimitas, committee chair and head coach at Philadelphia Sciences. He cited West Virginia’s narrow five-point victory over Kentucky at this year’s National Collegiate Rifle Championships as prompting the committee to more closely consider how ties are resolved in championships competition.

Under current rules, if there is a tie at the end of the final round, the match is declared complete and the winner is determined by compiling the last 10 shots of each team’s shooters. The team with the most points is declared the national champion.

The committee is recommending that deadlocked teams would resolve the tie with a shoot-off in which each team’s shooters would be allowed a specific number of shots. Those scores would be tallied and the team with the highest total would win. 

“As a coach, I think that’s a lot more exciting,” Klimitas said. “They are going to get a chance to shoot it off. It’s great from a coaching standpoint and from a player’s standpoint. It is spectacular for spectators because they will be able to watch the sudden-death tiebreak – and because of electronic scoring, they will see the results instantaneously.”

The committee also endorsed a recommendation to allow coaches to declare five shooters during regular-season matches, with the four highest totals counting toward a team’s score. Currently, teams are not limited in the number of shooters they may enter in regular-season competition, but they must declare four student-athletes whose scores make up the team total.

Klimitas said the proposed change would not affect the championships format, in which teams are allowed to bring five shooters, four of which are declared for both the smallbore and air rifle portions of the championships.

If adopted, the proposal would break from tradition, particularly in NCAA and international competition, in which teams have always declared four shooters and applied those shooters’ scores toward the final results. However, the recommendation is rooted in a Collegiate Rifle Coaches Association 2008 survey that reflected coaches’ support for the change.

“The big points on this are that it gives the head coach a little more flexibility. It certainly takes a little pressure off him or her, and there is substantial support for this from the coaches. We’re simply moving on that,” said Klimitas.

The committee could not reach consensus on a third proposal that would have modified the qualification criteria that weighs a shooters’ top three regular-season scores and requires that those scores come for three different ranges. These scores make up 50 percent of the qualifying score for championships. (The other 50 percent is based on a shooter’s performance during the qualifying weekend.) However, the committee considered changing the criteria to require that only two of three top scores come from different ranges.

Klimitas said although the current requirement helps ensure that teams schedule a combination of home and away matches, the criteria disadvantage teams in geographically remote areas, particularly in the West. It’s more difficult for those teams to meet the requirement because they must travel long distances to most or all of their matches, he said. That becomes an economic concern, Klimitas said, because of the weight and amount of equipment with which teams travel and the airline fees associated with checking baggage.

Although the committee took no action on the proposal, Klimitas said the issue likely will be revisited at next year’s annual meeting.

In other actions, the committee issued two interpretations and one correction to rules, all of which will be detailed in a memo to coaches later this summer. The group also recommended Akron coach Newt Engle as chair.