TCU Rifle captured NCAA national championships in 2010, 2012 and 2019, but the program’s fourth title proved elusive.

The Horned Frogs had, several times, been on the brink of adding another gold medal to the mantel. In 2021 and 2022, TCU’s all-women team was runner-up to Kentucky. In 2023, the Frogs finished second to 11-time winners Alaska-Fairbanks.

With three consecutive silver medal showings, TCU had come within a combined 27 points of claiming another trio of national titles.

On the eve of the 2024 championship’s closing day of competition on March 9, with TCU trailing 19-time champions West Virginia, assistant coach Hannah Black ’16 said she had a hunch her Horned Frogs would break through.

The coaching staff, along with the five student-athletes selected to represent TCU at the NCAAs, gathered at the team hotel for dinner. Black remembers thinking to herself: No matter what happens, this team is really special.

Jeanne Haverhill dials in for a shot during the 2024 NCAA Rifle Championships in Morgantown, West Virginia. Courtesy of TCU Athletics

Stephanie Allan ’23 (MS ’24) said the pre-championship meal was a moment to take a collective breath before returning to the shooting line the following morning.

“It was actually Hannah’s birthday that day. The competition wasn’t really even on our minds,” Allan said. “And I think that’s probably what helped.”

Black said she could feel the magic brewing. “They knew what they needed to do. And the next morning, they showed up, and they delivered.”

In the first of two air rifle relays the next day, sophomore Katie Zaun achieved a near-perfect score of 598, obliterating the bullseye on 54 of her 60 shots.

Allan, shooting for the last time as a Frog, and sophomore Mikole Hogan were up next. They supplemented the strong start with scores of 595 and 596, respectively, in the relay’s second leg, powering the program to its second title in five years.

“It means to me what it means to the team,” said coach Karen Monez of the championship’s significance. “They’re the ones who have to put in the hard work. This is their reward for, really, years of sacrifice and training and the time they put into this. It’s their reward.”

A family affair

The road to TCU’s fourth national championship began with Monez’s introduction to the sport in the late 1960s.

A native of San Leandro, California, Monez said her kid brothers got her father involved in shooting sports. Monez’s dad, in turn, convinced her to join a junior program.

“It wasn’t something that really interested me initially. It took about a year,” said Monez, who started competing at 14. “I just started winning some local matches. As my skills improved, my interest grew and kept on growing; the more I worked at it, the better I got. And it eventually became my passion.”

What developed was a world-class career in shooting sports.

Coach Karen Monez, right, and Stephanie Grundsøe debrief during an October 2023 home match against Nebraska and West Virginia. Photo by Sharon Ellman

Involved in disciplines spanning from smallbore to air rifle, air pistol to cowboy action shooting — a timed competition in which participants take aim at targets using firearms typical of the Old West — Monez was a winner everywhere she went.

Monez spent three of her 25 years in the military as a member of the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit International Rifle Section and the other 22 on the U.S. Army Reserve Shooting Team.

Monez was on the United States’ 1978 World Shooting Championships-winning team. With 18 gold medals in Seoul, the U.S. had three times more than any other country. The Americans and Monez followed with another team title in 1979 and a third in 1982.

She won eight individual titles and 19 team titles competing in the U.S. International Shooting National Championships between 1974 and 1988. Monez holds records in different events at several other major championships — a total of 55 individual and 42 team national records — from the Cowboy Action Shooting National and World Championships to the NRA Indoor National Championships.

Shooting Sports USA included Monez on its list of the 50 Great Competitive Shooters of the 20th Century.

Monez has lived in the Fort Worth area for over 40 years but didn’t move into coaching until 2004. That year, she became TCU’s second head coach since the rifle program’s inaugural 1991-92 season.

Annie Oakley on the wall

One of Monez’s first orders of business was to hang a framed photograph of famed sharpshooter and American folk heroine Annie Oakley on her office wall.

“Any woman who does not thoroughly enjoy tramping across the country on a clear frosty morning with a good gun and a pair of dogs does not know how to enjoy life,” reads the photo’s caption.

Oakley’s portrait, frozen in time, hung on Monez’s wall for several years as her program evolved. As a byproduct of the surging success, everything around it began to transform.

“I think everything, from top to bottom, has changed.”
Karen Monez on the program's evolution the past two decades

A stream of All-American shooters funneled through Fort Worth: Lauren Sullivan ’10, Sarah Scherer ’13, Elizabeth Marsh ’21 and then current student-athletes Zaun, Allan and Stephanie Grundsøe ’23 — multiple of whom have taken their talents to the Olympic stage.

Monez steered them all to greatness as the program became a marvel of consistency.

TCU is one of only four programs to win a national title since 2006. The Horned Frogs have also registered a top-three national ranking in 15 of the past 18 seasons.

“They’ve always been very consistent,” said West Virginia Rifle coach Jon Hammond, who led the Mountaineers to five consecutive national titles between 2013 and 2017. Monez is “a fierce competitor. We know every year that TCU is going to be hard to beat. And I think that comes down to Karen.”

In Monez’s 20 years at the helm, TCU’s facilities have also undergone a transformation. The team building, located in the heart of campus and formerly shared with TCU’s Army ROTC program, has since become dedicated to the rifle team.

“I think everything, from top to bottom, has changed,” said Monez of the program’s development over the past two decades. The trophy-laden facility, which boasts new electronic targets, is a symbol of progress for the many Horned Frogs student-athletes who played a role in building TCU Rifle.

The evolution of an all-time coach

Allan said she first met Monez as a freshman in high school. “My dad will never let me forget it.”

The Greenwich, Connecticut, native was competing in youth nationals, and Monez happened to be in attendance. Knowing his daughter had long considered TCU a dream destination for college, Allan’s father encouraged her to introduce herself.

“I was like, ‘No way, she’s so scary,’ ” Allan said.

Monez and Allan’s paths would cross again. Years later, when Allan was visiting campus following her admittance to TCU, she popped into the rifle range to speak with the coach about her intentions to pursue a roster spot as a walk-on.

After building on a promising 2019-20 freshman campaign with an even better sophomore year, Allan competed in all 14 of the team’s matches as a junior in 2021-22, making her NCAA Championships debut while securing a first-team All-American nod in air rifle.

Soon after helping the Horned Frogs secure another national championship, Stephanie Allan ’23 (MS ’24) agreed to join Memphis’s coaching staff as a graduate assistant. Courtesy of TCU Athletics

Allan opened the 2023-24 campaign by registering the eighth perfect 600 score in program history, hitting the target’s one-half millimeter wide innermost ring on all 60 shots she took in the air rifle competition.

Allan said Monez is known for her stoic nature. “When I got there, there was no emotion,” she said. “If you had a good day, you got a head nod.”

Seeing Allan post a 600 had Monez in tears.

Pop, and a perfect 10

Allan culminated her final Horned Frog season in the WVU Coliseum on a drizzly Saturday morning in Morgantown, West Virginia, last March.

Mary Tucker, a 2020 Tokyo Olympics silver medalist and 2024 Team USA athlete at the Paris Games, pushed the Mountaineers to a six-point opening day lead at the NCAA Rifle Championships.

“I think people automatically thought West Virginia was going to win,” Allan said. “They had an outstanding season. They had the higher averages. Everything they could ask for, they had it. That kind of took some pressure off. As if, well, ‘We’re not expected to win.’ ”

Grundsøe, a TCU graduate student and member of the Danish national team at the Paris Games, was central in bringing the Horned Frogs back from a 2,353-2,347 deficit. She registered a 596 score in the first of two air rifle relays on the NCAA Championship’s final day, a score tied for the fifth-best tally among the 24 shooters participating.

Next came the second leg, which saw Allan and Hogan shooting side-by-side and each finishing top five among a field of 22.

Allan was the first of the competitors to finish her round. Realizing she had just taken her final shots as a Horned Frog student-athlete, she froze. Monez and Black signaled her to remain on the shooting line, as Hogan had several shots remaining.

“I stayed there because I didn’t want to be a distraction,” Allan said. “The movement is where you get that distraction from. And selfishly, it allowed me to collect some of my emotions and really process, like, ‘Wow, that was my last match for TCU.’ ”

Hogan stood motionless — the gun’s butt tucked against her shoulder, its stock flush to her cheek — and squeezed the trigger.

Pop.

With official scores lagging behind the action and still not announced, Black was furiously crunching the numbers.

TCU Rifle assistant coach Hannah Black ’16 said she had “this feeling” the Horned Frogs would rally for their fourth national title. Courtesy of TCU Athletics

“I was sitting there doing the numbers back and thinking, ‘I think we did it. I think we did it,’ ” Black said. “Karen’s like, ‘They’re not done, there’s no way,’ And I’m like, ‘No, I think we did it.’ ”

A perfect 10 surfaced on the scoreboard. TCU had reached the mountaintop for the fourth time.

The NCAA Broadcast’s analyst Verena Zaisberger marveled at the consideration Allan showed to Hogan by remaining motionless at the end of her round.

“It’s a sign of loyalty. It’s a sign of respect,” Zaisberger said.

Monez, who over her two-decades-long tenure as head coach has led the program to first or second-place national finishes on nine separate occasions, said the display proves how her team members support one another. “You might say they have each other’s back.”

The coach beamed when her Horned Frogs — clad in white t-shirts and grey caps bearing the words National Champions— stepped to the top of the podium to receive their trophies.

“We’re slowly starting to see those emotions” from the legendary coach, Allan said. “We see how she pours everything into this program. And I think that’s really why we’re successful.”