The first thing Gabriela Zych noticed were the billboards.

Billboards are banned in Zych's native Alaska, so when she moved to Memphis for her freshman year of college, well, they stood out. A lot was different, besides that — the climate, the environment, how people talk — but that was the sacrifice she made to be a Division I athlete.

"A lot of things kind of feel like a movie," the sophomore said. "Like fall. Fall is really long here. In Alaska, it's like two weeks."

Zych is the top shooter on Memphis' No. 13-ranked rifle team. She's ranked No. 12 individually in the country, pretty impressive for someone who picked up the sport as a freshman in high school. She came to Memphis without having visited the city, convinced by a recruiting pitch from an interim coach and a chance to test herself at the highest levels of the sport to which she'd recently committed.

It has worked so far. She led the Tigers to wins over No. 7 Ole Miss and No. 9 Murray State this past weekend, giving Memphis momentum heading into NCAA qualifiers Saturday.

"Gabriella is just a big sponge, like you throw any kind of information at her, she's gonna absorb it and try to learn," coach Morgan Phillips said. "I also think she just has this very natural ability to understand how the sport works. A lot of it is just kind of her personality and temperament, too. She's a very calm person."

An escape from P.E.

Zych grew up in Anchorage. She picked up a gun only because she needed a P.E. credit and saw that rifle seemed to be the only sport she could find that satisfied the requirement and didn't involve any running.

She hadn't played other sports when she was growing up, but she'd been a ballet dancer for a few years. That was, until an 11-year-old Zych had to do ballet summer school and decided to drop it.

"I wasn't the best ballerina," Zych said. "I wasn't super athletic growing up. Like, yes, I am a Division-I athlete, but I can't say I was the first one picked for the kickball team or stuff like that as a kid. I played outside and stuff but I was never super athletic."

She made the cut for the Service High School rifle team and found that she actually liked shooting, and that she was pretty good at it. She started traveling to tournaments and picking up recruitment interest — in the small world of competitive shooting, everyone kind of knows everyone, Phillips said. It would be unfathomable for the Memphis football team to start recruiting Anchorage, but it wasn't difficult for Phillips to go after Zych.

Phillips was only the interim coach when she recruited Zych to the Bluff City. Just 25, she was a grad assistant at Memphis before she was elevated to interim coach and then eventually named permanent coach in 2022. She had a highly successful career at West Virginia, and that helped sell Zych on moving to the Lower 48 for the first time in her life.

"Obviously, I didn't 100 percent know what I was doing," Phillips said, "but it worked out."

Zych quickly made her coach's confidence pay off. She was second on the team as a freshman, then improved this season and is now a part of the USA shooting development team — one notch below the national team.

It was also a major life transition. She always notices the surprised looks when she's in a new class and everyone has to go around and say where they're from. She chuckles when people complain about the cold, though she notes she'd never had to drip her faucets before the ice storm Memphis had to deal with in January.

And — really, this is true — a classmate once asked her if they had color TV in Alaska.

"People think we take sled dogs to school, or polar bears," she said.

Her friends back home in Anchorage want to know about Memphis — is it warm? Is Southern hospitality really a thing? And how's the barbecue?

'I always find my heart racing'

Zych wasn't sure until the end of her high school career that she'd even have the opportunity to shoot in college. She planned to go to a community college and get an air traffic control certification, or maybe enroll at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and try to shoot at club level.

Then Phillips came calling, altering the trajectory of her life.

Phillips is impressed with how much Zych has improved, especially because getting better when you're already at her level means changing literally millimeters in your approach — everything needs to be drilled constantly, just to get a tiny bit better every day.

There's also a major mental component to rifle, so Phillips starts every practice with mindfulness exercises.

"The faster your heart is going to be, the more you're going to see it on target, making it harder to shoot, which I've definitely struggled with," Zych said. "Especially if you get into a final, those are super, super stressful, and I always find my heart racing. But also, some of shooting is just learning how to deal with it and learning how to shoot through it. Because you can always stop it."

She's working on that while also hoping to compete nationally and internationally. Her plan of getting that air traffic control certification is permanently on hold — she wants to be a graduate assistant for a rifle team after she finishes her college career.

Until then, she's focused on shuttling between Memphis and wherever the next rifle competition is while making the occasional trip back to Anchorage.

"I miss the mountains, sometimes," she said. "I'll say that."

Reach sports writer Jonah Dylan at jonah.dylan@commercialappeal.com or on Twitter @thejonahdylan.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Gabriela Zych is thriving for Memphis rifle — 3,000 miles from home