Best of Both Worlds: Academics, Shooting a Perfect Combo for Lieske

Written by Doug Goodnough

Being first comes naturally for Drew Lieske, ’18.

As a member of the fledgling Hillsdale College shotgun team, Lieske won an individual ACUI Collegiate National Championship and was a member of four ACUI national champion teams as a Charger.

Before coming to Hillsdale, he was the top-ranked high school sporting clays shooter in the U.S. at Davison (Michigan) High School and valedictorian of his class.

The competitive fires still burn for Lieske, but now as a businessman and entrepreneur. He and his father own and operate several businesses, including the Michigan Shooting Centers, which has Michigan locations in Lake Orion and Brighton. They also run Orion Outdoors, a gun shop that specializes in luxury shotguns.

“The original plan was to see if I could find something I enjoyed doing more than working for the family business,” said Lieske, who graduated from Hillsdale with a finance and math double major. “I’d always had a pretty strong interest in financial markets. Because of my background in math, I thought I wanted to be a portfolio manager.”

During several job interviews, the question would always come up: Why don’t you want to work in the family business?

“After two or three times being asked that same question, I realized that I had to lie to answer it,” Lieske said. “I didn’t really have a good answer. That’s kind of what steered me in the other direction of coming back and working for [my father]. I knew that I would be happy doing that. And that’s one of those things where they say, if you do something you love, you never work a day in your life.”

The family business was a big part of Lieske’s childhood. He grew up on a shooting range and honed his shooting skills to the point where he was one of the top high school shooters in the nation. When it came time to decide on a college, shooting wasn’t initially a consideration. But when Hillsdale College’s shotgun team visited the family’s range for a competition, he decided to learn more.

“I liked how they supported shooting sports, the academics they offered, and the conservative Christian values,” Lieske said.

When he arrived at Hillsdale, the Halter Shooting Sports Center was still in the development stages, and the program wasn’t yet considered a varsity sport. Using his family background, he helped with both.

“I used my knowledge of shooting ranges and range operations,” Lieske said. “My dad and I actually walked the facility and made some recommendations on where to lay up the sporting clays range on the property before it was constructed.”

He also helped convince the College to elevate shotgun to a varsity sport.

“I actually solicited funds from donors, in partnership with the coach, to get uniforms for the team because they were not supplied at the time,” Lieske said.

The Chargers were beginning a run of dominance in the Division III ACUI Collegiate National Championships. Hillsdale won its first team title in 2011 and then rattled off five straight championships from 2014-18. Lieske was a member of four of those teams, and in 2017, he claimed the individual national championship by breaking 531 out of a possible 550 targets. He was a three-time All-American at Hillsdale.

“One thing that was different for me from high school going into college was the team environment,” he said. “In target shooting, there’s not a whole bunch of team-type competitions. Going in as a freshman, I wanted to win that overall individual national championship. I knew that if I could do that, I was giving all that I could for the team.”

However, he learned he could use his experience and advice to help his teammates improve.

“It can be a challenge to help the team if you’re really focused on doing it all yourself,” Lieske said. “My mindset was to practice and train in a way where I felt like I was competing at my best and then just to do everything that I could to help anyone else on the team who needed help. Even in the middle of a round, if they felt like there was a target they had a problem with, I felt like I was an open book. … There was definitely a lot of coaching amongst teammates while I was there.”

He said adjusting to the academic rigor of Hillsdale was where teamwork helped. Lieske and former teammate and current Hillsdale Head Shotgun Coach Jordan Hintz, ’18, were study partners.

“The College is known for having a challenging academic course load, and that was definitely what my experience was,” Lieske said. “That was a new challenge for me. We spent a lot of time studying together in a way where we could help one another.”

Now, Lieske is focused on raising a family and running the business. He and his wife, Allie, have two young sons, and his father, Patrick, manages the shooting ranges with Drew as the CEO and co-founder of the gun shop.

“[The gun shop] has since grown to exceed the revenue of the two shooting ranges,” Lieske said of Orion Outdoors, which features exclusive European firearms like Kemen and Cosmi.

He remains close with Hintz and Hillsdale’s shotgun program, and occasionally the team comes up to shoot at the family range.

“I went Hillsdale because I thought it was the best of both worlds in terms of getting a meaningful college education and being able to do shooting,” Lieske said. “That’s still true today.”

Doug Goodnough, '90, is Hillsdale’s senior director of Alumni Marketing. He enjoys connecting with fellow alumni in new and wonderful ways.

Published in May 2026

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