Riflery is a sport made for West Virginia, and the Mountaineers of West Virginia University excel at the redneck sport. The team and its stories history — 14 collegiate championships — get much-deserved props in The Washington Post today:

West Virginia’s rifle team is the only Mountaineers squad to have won an NCAA championship — 14, in fact. And it’s the only team with its own line item in the state budget: a $100,000 annual appropriation that represents a none-too-subtle rebuke to a university that dropped its most decorated sport in 2003.

The team’s reinstatement and subsequent reclamation of its status as the nation’s preeminent shooting power is one of the more improbable comebacks in college sports. Instead of aspiring professional athletes, the key players were rank-and-file taxpayers, disillusioned parents and students, and small businesses such as Donnie’s Citgo and Bub’s Bar and Grill that mobilized a grass-roots fundraising campaign and lobbying campaign and forced the university to change its mind.

“Hunting and shooting is a big thing here,” says junior Brandi Eskew of Petersburg, W.Va., one of two women on WVU’s rifle team, who learned to hunt alongside her father as a child. “It’s something that pretty much everyone does at some point. And it’s something they can relate to more than a lot of other sports.”

In short, we hillbillies love to shoot things, be it deer or targets, and we know how to do it. Well, some of us do. I wish I could say I’m an expert marksman, but alas, I am the kind of redneck who more often than not can’t hit the proverbial broad side of barn.

There are plenty of us. But at least we can live vicariously through the WVU riflery team. Male or female, they make all of us Mountaineers proud.