The NTSA’s Nationals were held this weekend. WTSC won first place in the 3P on Friday (Richard Stapleton Jr.), came in 5th and 6th in the Prone on Saturday, and then took every spot in the Finals and won every place in every class in the Air Rifle on Sunday, with the exception of the gold medal in the 40-shot championships.
I shot a 452 in the air pistol on Sunday morning, with the five other shooters who entered – bottom of the pack, but I’m not fretting as the first shot of the match was my first shot on that pistol 😀 Scores are still too low for there even to be a Nationals to be honest – we should have waited a year or two before having it as anything but a club shoot. More on the air pistol in another post though.
Shot a 562 in the air rifle. I wasn’t terribly happy with it, though string four wasn’t too bad. 8,9 at the start – I think I was still thrown by the lights dipping in the previous string because of someone putting on the kettle on the range (speaking of, for flip’s sakes lads, fix it so that doesn’t happen, would you? It’s a [i]National Championships[/i]!) – but then I settled in and shot the nicest little group of eight tens. 97 with an 8 isn’t too bad. But the tail ends of the match just weren’t any good. 92, 93, 95, 97, 93, 92. And there’s not really any great pattern in the strings either, it’s just more or less random noise. String 2 was even offset a bit to one side. More training time is needed. It’s so annoying to have the ability to shoot how I’d like to shoot just out of reach 😀
So between that, and the debacle over not letting the ladies shoot their 40-shot match concurrently with their 60-shot match (something that wasn’t announced ahead of time), I was too pissed off to stay for the finals. I placed fourth in the qualifying round, and would have gotten a medal by default had I stayed, but to be honest, I’m rather glad I didn’t. Says a lot about how our sport is going on the National level I’m afraid 🙁