Eagle River's Corey Cogdell is the Benjamin Button of trapshooting. Her career is unfolding in a curious way -- she's experiencing the natural order of things in reverse.
Usually the plan of attack for amateur athletes is to get a taste of success at home first and then take a shot at international fame and glory.
Cogdell did just the opposite. First came the international acclaim for her bronze medal at last year's Summer Olympics in Beijing. Then, on Saturday, she collected her first national championship by leading the women's trapshoot from start to finish at the USA Shooting National Shotgun Championships at Fort Carson, Colo.
"It usually doesn't happen that way," Cogdell said. "The director of USA Shooting came up to me and said that exact thing -- usually you win the national championship first, before you win the Olympic medal."
No matter. Cogdell, 22, is thrilled to add the national title to her resume as she prepares for next month's World Championships in Slovenia.
"It means a lot to me," she said. "I didn't compete last year because it was so close to the Olympics, so I chose not to compete and that was definitely hard. I really did want to win a national championship."
Cogdell, the bronze medalist at the 2007 national championships, scored 228 in Saturday's preliminaries to take a one-target lead into the six-woman finals. She hit 22 of 25 targets in the finals to capture the national title with a 250, three targets better than runnerup Kayle Browning of Wooster, Ark.
The victory does more than reaffirm Cogdell's status as the country's best trapshooter -- something she demonstrate a year ago, first by claiming the only Olympic berth available to American women, then by winning a four-way shootoff for the bronze medal in Beijing.
It tells her that she's on the right track after reinventing just about every aspect of her shooting habits in the aftermath of the Olympics.
Her coach, four-time Olympian Bret Erickson, decided before the Beijing Games that Cogdell's technique needed tweaking. They put off most of the work until after the Olympics, and in the last several months the pair has altered just about everything Codgell does .
"We changed my stance, we changed how I hold the gun, we changed how I focus on the target, we changed how I prepare for each shot. We revamped the whole thing," Cogdell said. "We also changed some adjustments on my gun to make things fit me better."
The goal was to make Cogdell a better and more consistent shooter in the long run. In the short run, though, implementing the changes tested her patience.
In World Cup competitions this season, she finished no higher than 10th, meaning she never once advanced to the finals -- something you'd expect now and then from a reigning Olympic medalist.
"There were many days in the past six months where I've sat on the shooting line and cried, because I was just so frustrated. I wasn't sure if we'd made the right changes," she said.
"But I've never been a quitter. I told myself I'm going to give it six months. This is the year after the Olympics so there's not a whole lot on the line this year, so I said I'd give it this year and trust my coach.
"I'm definitely thankful I was able to give (it) time and push through all those bad days, but there were days when I was thinking 'I've got my bronze medal, I could just pack it in.'
"But the lure of the gold medal and the next Olympics is definitely keeping me going."
Find Beth Bragg online at adn.com/contact/bbragg or call 257-4309.
By BETH BRAGG
bbragg@adn.com