I haven’t posted anything on the Intervarsities since the match, mainly because of some problems regarding team makeup and scores caused by confusion on the day, but that’s now been resolved. Scores are up on the DURC website, but suffice to say, we won 🙂
Personally, I’m quite happy with the way the squad performed on the day. They put in a large amount of training (over three months – not so easy when also managing a full academic workload and keeping a club running) and made dramatic improvements in their shooting standards, as predicted – even though on the day, match pressure took a heavy toll. However, I don’t think I did as well as I had hoped in their training. Several elements I had hoped to introduce had to be dropped for lack of time and resources. Next year, however, we’ll try again. And since we’ll have a larger body of experienced shooters, it should be interesting. We’ll probably need a second day of training per week just to keep up.
I also have several ideas on improving the ab initio training we’ll be doing with the juniors. I’ve said it before – it is perfectly possible to take someone who never saw any form of firearm prior to joining the club in Fresher’s week in October, and have them shoot over 520 by the time the Intervarsities roll around in March/April the next year. There simply is no technical, physical or mental obstacle to this that we don’t know how to overcome and which we have not already overcome. It does, however, require a training regieme that is somewhat counter to the classical approach we’ve seen in Ireland for the past few decades. Writing it up is something I want to do before this October. We also need to set a date for the colours very early indeed – I’ve asked Iain to try to sort this out before everyone heads off for the summer break, so that not only can we better plan our training, but also get the event on the CUSAI calendar and handle logistics with more lead time.