One of the new things we’re trying to encourage clubs to do this year to get more college students to take part in competitions is to run a detail on Thursday evenings for students only out in UCD – thus avoiding the bulk of the logistics problems of getting people transported to the far beyonds to get to ranges (which is easy for those of us in our 30s and 40s and 50s who have cars and such, but for students with no cars, no money and no public transport options to get to the ranges, is somewhat more of a challange).
Obviously, this can only apply to clubs using the UCD range for the rest of the details as well, or it wouldn’t be a shoulder-to-shoulder match anymore; but that’s all bar one club (WTSC) right now anyway. So when DURC ran a detail for their Open, guess who volunteered to spend his evening in UCD?
No, not Pierce Brosnan. I wish. The PR we’d get…
Anyway, it went reasonably well. Under-subscribed, with only 6 shooters (two pistol, four rifle). Got to the range late (thanks to the UCD policy of putting up roadblocks on campus like they were going out of fashion), so we started prep time at 1930. The competition went off with only one hitch after that, firing point 6 failed for Thomas Skelly; I moved him to firing point 8 and gave him an extra sighting target, unlimited sighters and five extra minutes, as per ISSF rules (8.6.5.1 for the interested).
Thus concludes the report š
Overall, it’s slow takeup but you expect that to start with. If it gets popular enough with the students, we’ll see participation numbers rise for relatively little effort, and that’s always a big plus.