Ian Miner grew up in a small town in Nebraska, on a twelve-acre acreage with horses, open ground, and room to shoot in any direction. He grew up around guns, though the precision rifle came later.
Some of his earliest memories are hunting pheasants alongside his dad with a bolt-action 20-gauge. His first deer rifle was a Remington 74 Sportsman in .30-06. Life revolved around sports, hard work, and the outdoors.
He knew he wanted to serve long before he ever enlisted. As a kid at a local rodeo, the announcer asked every veteran to stand and be recognized before the National Anthem. Ian looked across the crowd and saw his father, an Army veteran, standing with the other men who had served. He decided then that he'd serve too.
He played football, baseball, basketball, and track, earned a college football scholarship, and finished a degree in recreation management, which he likes to call "Boy Scouts for adults." In 2014, he joined the Marine Corps.
The Marine
Ian enlisted in 2014 as an 0311 infantry rifleman. Within months of hitting the fleet he knew he wanted more. He was drawn to the challenge and to the caliber of men in the Scout Sniper community, so he went to indoc and earned his spot in 1st Battalion, 7th Marines STA Platoon, callsign Strider.
He deployed twice with 1/7: Iraq in 2015, then Iraq and Afghanistan in 2017 as a Scout Sniper Team Leader. On that second deployment he worked alongside the 101st Airborne Division and earned the Combat Infantry Badge, the same badge his grandfather earned in the European Theater in World War II.
The Long Way In
His path into the sniper community wasn't a straight line. He failed the Basic Reconnaissance Primer Course twice. One of the instructors who washed him out, a man named Jon, would years later become his teammate at The Cadre. He failed Scout Sniper school twice, too. Ian is a self-described "two-time retread," and he doesn't hide from it.
Failing sniper school the first time, it was almost good for me. It allowed me to want it even more.
He fought his way back into Scout Sniper school during a deployment workup. He made the calls, leaned on the relationships he'd built, and got himself back in the door. Then he got two of his teammates in with him. All three graduated.
His instructors at the schoolhouse were Phil Velayo, Bumpus, Curry, and Trujillo. By his own account, Ian felt like he didn't belong in the room. He kept his head down and did the work.
The Scout Sniper
The discipline that got hammered into him from day one, in his platoon and as a junior sniper, was calling his shot: every round, where the shot actually broke, not where he meant to send it.
He carried that habit through deployments, where he learned to range a target by hand when the rangefinder dies. He still teaches both today.
After the Corps
While he was still in, Ian finished a master's in sports management and coaching through the United States Sports Academy. He already knew he wanted to coach. When he left active duty in 2019, he went two directions at once: football coaching and long-range instruction. He taught at Rev-Tac in Nebraska before a lead instructor spot opened up.
Phil Velayo was leaving Gunwerks in Cody, Wyoming, and there was a spot. Ian reached out, Phil took him under his wing, and Ian moved west. He took over Phil's old position and spent about five years there, training hunters from all over the country in long-range marksmanship, rifle setup, ballistics, and field application.
The Hunter
He's blunt about coming to hunting late. Out of the Marine Corps he wasn't a hunter, and teaching hunters at Gunwerks before he hunted himself nagged at him, so he took it up on his own. Now hunting is the thing he loves most, and he guides for it in Wyoming. He's hunted and guided a long list of big game. What matters to him is the responsibility of taking an animal to feed his family, and the single shot it comes down to.
A miss on a hunt hurts way more than on a competition, where you're going to shoot ten more rounds the next stage. That's why I love the hunting so much. It's your one chance, and you have to figure all of it out.
His standout story is a bull elk he took deep in grizzly country. He made the shot, packed the animal a few hundred yards, and hung it in a tree. They had counted eight grizzlies in the area that day, and one came over a hill and watched them work. He still talks about his partner that day, Mike Mun, a man he describes as the best partner he could have asked for and one he barely knew. He says he's never had buck fever, not even on that bull. The adrenaline comes, but the Marine Corps trained the panic out of him.
Competition
Ian is newer to competition than most of the Cadre staff, and he's honest about it. He competes because he teaches it, and he wants to feel what his students feel on the line.
Hunting is what I love. Competing is what I want to improve in, so that I can relate to a lot of the students we're teaching.
NRL Hunter is his flavor: find the target, range it, build a solution, make the hit, and do it as a team. He's competitive to a fault and walks off most matches angry at how he shot, which is exactly why he keeps signing up.
How He Teaches
Phil calls Ian the most relatable instructor on the staff. He cares about the person behind the rifle more than the number on the target. He'll call himself a "pig hugger" before he runs a class through like an assembly line.
The way he teaches a concept bends to your goal. Shooting is shooting, but a hunter and a competitor have different priorities, and Ian tunes the lesson to the shooter in front of him. He pushes students to close the gap between learning something and actually doing it, to put a new concept to work the same day instead of stacking up theory. And he's a believer in trusting your own system: don't take a result on faith from a video, go shoot it and prove it for yourself.
His teaching comes down to three things: confidence, fundamentals, and application. He wants every student to leave with a real understanding of their rifle system, knowing what to do and why they're doing it, so the skills hold up long after the class is over. And he wants them to leave knowing they've got an instructor they can come back to.
He's not precious about gear, either. He'll tell you that you can shoot just about any rifle if your fundamentals are sound. A good setup helps you get the most out of it, but it's rarely the thing holding a shooter back.
Leave your ego and expectations at the door. Jump in with both feet. You're never going to be ready, so you might as well start now.
The Rifles
Ian doesn't think long range should be reserved for people with expensive rifles and premium glass. His own personal rifles are customs, built on Defiance actions and Proof barrels, wearing Leupold Mark 5 optics and Thunder Beast cans. But he cares just as much about helping a shooter wring everything out of budget-friendly gear.
That's part of why he's the Cadre's resident expert on hunting cartridges and Bergara rifles. He's lost count of how many Bergaras he owns, somewhere north of a dozen. His teaching rifle is a Bergara B14 Wilderness HMR in 6.5 Creedmoor, with a 22-inch barrel, a Thunder Beast suppressor, and 140-grain ELD-Ms running around 2,700 feet per second. For hunting he reaches for a 7 PRC. He sets his rifles up in mils, a habit from the military so that if he ever has to pick up a service rifle again he's still in the game, but he's at home in both mils and minutes.
He handloads, but he keeps factory-ammo rifles around for a reason. A few months before he joined The Cadre, his house burned down. When he built a new 7 PRC for hunting season, he drove to the local sporting goods store, bought two boxes off the shelf, and had it zeroed and ready inside ten rounds.
Faith & Family
Above everything else, Ian's life is built on faith and family. His faith in Christ is the foundation under all of it, and his biggest job is leading his wife and three kids well.
He puts it simply: once a warrior for his country, now a warrior for his family, his faith, and the people he gets to serve through instruction.
Train with Ian
If you're a hunter who wants to make the first round count, or a shooter looking to get into competition without the ego, Ian's your guy. He cares more about whether you got what you came for than anything else. Check the schedule to see when he's on deck.