So last night saw the first night’s training for the DURC squad. Not a bad attendance, with twelve shooters down for training all told, and another six sending apologies. Some serious potential in there as well. We should see most of them top the 520 mark by the time the match rolls round in March/April next year.
Last night saw the explanation of the intervarsities, what the squad will do, what’s expected of the squad members, and how the training will progress. Then we did some trigger work for a good half-hour or more. I think it was too long to spend on it myself, but shot without jackets it was good endurance training for the muscles as well as for trigger control. We won’t be doing anything for quite so long without firing pellets again though, but we’ll keep the drill going over the course of the training. We managed to get rifles assigned to people (and we’ve still got six to go there at least, so it’s going to be interesting from a logistics point of view), and got cheekpiece setups for two people sorted out. Stefan will be helping me coach, so that’s going to make things much easier – two pairs of eyes being better than one here.
We do have too many people showing up at once though; I’ll have to organise four or five shifts of an hour or 40 minutes so we can get more work done, and email round the new times for people.
A small competition at the end without jackets and with each shot timed and scored as in a 10-shot finals (but with 30 seconds to mount the rifle, aim and fire) worked quite well, I think this will be a mainstay for us. Scoring was simple, using the Edelmann control targets:
(that last one caught out stefan twice, hence the lack of his crushing defeat of all the newbies 😀 )
And the three-shot tiebreaking final (and the coach’s contribution 😀 ):
Next time, we sort out the cheekpieces and work on sighting and aiming…