10point9

The DURC squad for next year’s Colours match started training last night. Last year, we had 12 shooters show up for the first night of training, and we were a little pushed for space. So you can imagine that the 23 who showed up last night – for the junior squad alone! – gave us a bit more of a shove! We’re going to run half-hour training details from 6 to 10 on Monday nights to get them all in, with details assigned to shooters already. We had a sum total of one slot free at the end of that. This is probably the biggest squad we’ve ever had in training; it certainly is for as long as I’ve been shooting competitively in the club, and it’s got a much better gender balance with 9 girls to 14 boys. This will be useful because frankly, women have a physiological and psychological advantage in shooting, especially from the standing position. (Hips and less testosterone, in other words )

As with last year, we have already some serious potential in the squad. It’s too early to say for definite, but if they stick with the training, I think we’ll see most of them between 500 and 520 by the Colours, and probably quite a few will be past there.

So, as for last year, last night saw the explanation of the colours match, how the squad will train, and what’s expected of them. Then we did some trigger work for about ten to fifteen minutes each from a seated position. Normally, they won’t do that for more than five minutes when we do the drill again during the training, but when 23 people show up, you want something that’s basic and fast to set up as an exercise. Once the rota kicks in, this will get much easier. We’ve not managed to get rifles assigned to people yet, so that’s for next Monday (and with 23 people, it’s going to be interesting…) and cheekpiece setups can wait for a few weeks yet. Not having Stefan about this year will be a bit of a disadvantage, but we’ll muddle through somehow.

We’ll have twelve regular training days between now and the colours match, once a week; they’ll get another session or two for shooting during the week; we’ll get to at least two or three matches in the new year, and we’ll do at least one of those in Wilkinstown so they’re used to the WTSC range. We’ll also have to put up a few photos of the WTSC and UCDRC ranges in DURC so they know what to expect in terms of looks at least. And I have a few new ideas for training drills and so on.

And that’s just the junior squad. We’re still working out what to do with the dozen or so shooters competing for places in the experienced squad!

Yup, this year’s gonna be a good one allright

To teach is to learn twice.
-Joseph Joubert

Haven’t said much about the squad in recent days, but it’s been training away as hard as ever. All of the shooters are showing excellent potential already and several of them have started to achieve some of that potential on the firing line. We’re getting into the final stages of the Intervarisity preperations now – there are only four training days left before the match – so we’re down to the last few steps. Hopefully we can get the entire squad into the WAA Postal match though, so that after the Colours they don’t just drop away from training. There’s too many good shooters there to let that happen. If they keep training as they have been, we’re going to break club records this year…