NORTHFIELD, Vt. -  The Norwich Rifle team hosted their final home match of the season on Saturday as the MIT Engineers made the trip north from Cambridge. Three different Cadets shot new career highs as Aiden Burris, Ben Kelley, and Evan Elders each notched personal bests on the day. 

Coming off of a close 18 point loss in their last outing, but setting a new school record combined score of 4304 on January 4^th, the young Cadets had hopes of continuing their improvement, and they did just that. In only the second year since being reinstated as a varsity program, the Rifle team set new program records in both disciplines, a 2175 in Smallbore and 2162 in Air Rifle, which becomes the new program record score of 4337.

Halfway through the match, the Cadets had a 2175-2127 lead over the Engineers. The strong first half was led by a pair of career highs. Sophomore Aiden Burris continued his strong upward trend with a career high of 565. Freshman Ben Kelley was not far behind as he established a new career high with the score of 555. 

Not to be outdone, MIT produced their best showing of the year during the Air Rifle portion of the competition scoring 2240 to Norwich's 2162. The hot shooting by MIT was enough to overcome the strong showing by the Cadets. Freshman Evan Elders was the third Cadet to set a new career high on a day that demonstrated the continued growth of the overall team. The Cadets would fall to MIT by a total of only 30 points in the match but improved in the overall conference standings. Norwich's match score raised the season average to third in the conference, trialing only MIT and URI.  

The individual scores for Norwich were:
Aiden Burris 565 Smallbore (new career high), 555 Air Rifle
Ben Kelley 555 Smallmore (new career high), 546 Air Rifle 
Evan Elders 534 Smallbore, 545 Air Rifle (new career high)
Jasmin Mann 519 Smallbore, 516 Air Rifle
Brady Simmons 528 Smallbore, 517 Air Rifle
Jacob Cohn 521 Smallbore
Sage Kontny 509 Air Rifle

On Saturday, February 17th, the Cadets will travel to West Point to compete in the NCAA qualifiers which will be the last factor in determining final rankings. Currently, Norwich has already improved by four spots over last year's final season rankings.