“I was very lucky to have all four of these people go with me to Rio because all our lives are hectic, we’re all doing very busy things," Lucas said. "Just for the 60 shots of glory I wouldn’t want any other people there but these four. I’m very lucky.”

From a young age, Lucas Kozeniesky’s mother worked with him to teach him how to learn any subject. He has an auditory processing disorder which makes it very hard to absorb information and credits where he is now in school to her patience and dedication to teaching him. On the rifle side of things, "One thing that was really great about my mom," Lucas said, "is that she was really supportive of me doing this sport in high school. When my dad deployed to Fuji, he wasn’t able to take me to practice so Mom would wake up at 5 a.m. every Saturday and drive me to the NRA headquarters range where I would shoot for two hours then come home."

His mom has always been supportive, especially during the time when things didn’t really make sense but they were going places and they were going places fast because he went from being worst on the team at the end of freshman year to one of the counting members November his sophomore year. "Regardless of what's going on she is always so proud of me and I'm very thankful for that."

Before deploying to Fuji, every Saturday his father would get up, they'd go to the range and while Lucas practiced, his father would sit there learning about the sport. He read textbooks and took coaching classes so that he could be a better coach for Lucas. What ended up happening was he became one of the coaches for the Robinson rifle team.

"My dad is a great role model. He’s very humble and he doesn’t like taking credit for things even though he has done a lot of awesome stuff as a marine, a parent, and as a person. His leadership is so naturally and he probably doesn’t see it happening. I’ve always respected how my dad was one of the most persistent of those coaches because there were very few Saturdays where he just chit chatted. There was always something to work on and somewhere to improve. He wasn’t talking to the best shooters, always to the worst. Motivating and inspiring them. Trying to give them the right path to walk on.

"Since I've started going through college it has been nothing but support from both my mom and dad. Whatever match they can get to they’re always so stressed out watching me shoot but always so supportive."

Lucas' junior year of high school he met North Carolina State University's head rifle coach, Keith Miller.

"At the time I was still maturing and with my learning disability when I asked him a question and didn’t understand his response he stopped and rephrased it, and it made perfect sense. At that moment I was like that’s the kind of guy I want to work with because he cares.”

Miller has coached, guided and provided a lot perspective for Lucas during the three years he has been his coach.

"He has an engineering mindset so he’s always working to find solutions to problems. He’s very technical and knowledgeable in the sport. In my opinion, he’s very much underrated." Lucas said. "He cares about his team, he cares about his students and he works to make them better."

Miller likes to say that parents do the hard thing; they go from 1-18 and he does the equally hard thing of going 18-22. Bringing all these young adults to mature professional people that can be self-sustaining and are ready for the rest of their lives after they leave his care. He takes pride in being a parent away from home and that's his main focus, being an educator and perspective giver to all his shooters.

"He’s able to fine tune my positions and the technical stuff, and he mastered a way to communicate to me which is key because when info needs to be passed quickly in a stressful situation like before finals or during a match when I have to come off the line needing a solution he explains it in a way that sticks."

Lucas and I have been dating for the last six years.

"Whenever we see each other we make the most of it, which has really made the whole thing worth it because I’m not sacrificing one thing for another. I’m able to make both things work and she supports me and she likes what I’m doing. She’s able to contribute in her own ways to what I’m doing and what NC State’s team is doing. She’s by far my biggest fan. She wants to give me, the NC State team, and the sport the amount of attention it deserves. She does it by telling her friends and family what it’s about and boasting about it on social media whenever she can.

"People recognize that and people know her. They don’t know her directly because they know her as just a name on Facebook posting and sharing things but they come up to me, 'Oh, your girlfriend does this and that. She’s very active.' She knows who all these people are, she watches my matches and knows how I’m doing and how they’re doing. She can read the target screens and know what’s going on because she’s invest so much time into learning this sport by herself and that is something that not a lot of people do in general. Just that by itself, there’s a one in a million chance that anyone would dedicate themselves so much to something outside of what they’re used to something they may never do to learn it as far as she did. She did it to support me and to support my friends."