Getting more shooters into the sport

phantom_lord

I was at the pony club tetrathlon competition at the weekend (it consists of running, swimming, shooting(10 shots, 10m air rifle) and horse riding) and I was wondering if an effort on the same scale of the Pentathlon assoc. of Ireland could be made to try and gain more pony club people into target shooting. Basically the Pentathlon committee had a stand in the hall where the shooting phase was conducted showing videos and giving out leaflets trying to get more members to join. They also had a fencing demonstration (Pentathlon consists of 5 phases with fencing being the fifth), but I doubt we'd need a shooting demonstration... On sat about 150 pony club members shot air rifle mixed between prone and standing, if ten percent of them joined we'd almost double attendances at some shoots. This essentially is a massive pool of ready prepared talent; someone just needs to tap into it, similar to how Matt and Geoff of WTSC did last year. That yielded five juniors who were part of a team of seven who travelled to Bisely this year. In this years competition those five juniors raised the bar in shooting in Pony Club and made an awareness of target shooting that should be built on. Two of the members of the team put in very strong scores while the other three shot 900 out of 1000 (A 10 is 100, a 9 is 90 etc) setting records in the process. And I would have to say many of the pony clubbers show great potential and an ability to surpass those scores with the right help, many of them comfortably shooting 80s+ with little gear or full time training.


I'm just wondering should someone from the NTSA be there or even reps from UCD or Trinity rifle club just to make more of an interest in the sport of target shooting.

Just as an after thought (neither of these two ideas are mine, credit goes to Geoff Cooney), should a new category be set up to encourage more pony club people to join? Since in pony club the juniors shoot prone air rifle and seniors shoot standing could we try doing 2p competitions in air rifle? Before moving to 3p? If more people move in to 3p .22 would it not be worth the effort?

And another point, since pony club tetrathlon is just 10 shots how about a new 30 shot category to bring them slowly up to 60 shots if 60 is too much of a jump?

The Pentathlon committee sees the potential of tapping into the pony club members, why can't our committee do the same?

Sparks

The Pony Club's definitely the largest source of junior shooters in the country right now PL, and we've been tapping it on a small scale for a couple of years now, with DURC and WTSC training their juniors in shooting and then exposing them to our style of competition (which uses the same targets and equipment) in their off-season (happily their off-season is our traditional air rifle competitive season). We've seen a fair few very good shooters emerge that way, which benefits the NTSA, and they've seen their scores climb enormously for comparatively little effort (compared to gaining points in running/riding/swimming), which benefits the IPC, and the shooters have been enjoying themselves tremendously thanks to their progress, which benefits both them and the sport in general.

There are two other sources of shooters that aren't being tapped at all at the moment, however - scouts and college graduates. The scouts had shooting merit badges from their founding; reestablishing those would be a source of new shooters at junior level. College graduates, meanwhile, produce around 100 or so trained shooters at levels from recreational plinkers up to high-level competitive shooters, every single year between UCD and TCD. UCDRC was founded in 1989; that means we've seen, conservatively, about 1300 trained shooters graduate from college since then. Where are they? Well, they graduate and go from an environment where they don't have to worry about firearms licences or gun safes or anything like that, and only lay out a minimal amount of money (though given their budget at the time, not minimal to the student!), and basicly come along and shoot with the same degree of committment you need to go bowling on a weeknight. Then they hit the outside world and have to learn to balance work, spare time, and so on, they have to lay out lots of money on buying a car in many cases, rent, food, etc, etc, etc, and then they turn around and if they look to see what it costs to stay in shooting it works out as very expensive (300 for club membership, plus capitation, plus 2000 for the same gear they used in college, plus the hassle of the firearms licence, plus 200 for the gun safe, plus... well, you get the idea).
What's needed are clubs who cater to new graduates; club guns, introductory pricings, flexible hours, etc, etc. But there aren't many clubs that would have much in that line. One or two have nothing in that line at all. And there's no basic "so you want to start target shooting" kind of booklet out there either, no web page, no local contact list for gunsmiths/shops, no checklist of things a new shooter needs and estimates of when he/she needs them, nothing. Well. I tried to make a start on some stuff, but, well, you know what happened on that front.

But, leaving all that aside, you need two further things to capitalise on those sources: a willing committee who will try new approaches properly (which takes both the courage to try new ideas or retry old ones that failed because of external factors that may have changed, and the competetence to properly analyse an approach and see if it fits in with our demographics and goals and resources); and people on the ground in the clubs who will support those approaches and do the actual gruntwork. We have a few of the latter, Matt and Geoff I'd know best myself and they're getting the best competitive results, but there are many others out there; but the former eludes us at present.

Basicly, we need the NTSA to get coaches accredited in every club, approach the Scouts and IPC at board level and do the formalities (in the Scouts, setting the syllabus for the Merit badges, arranging for insurance and covering the coaches under the Code of Ethics for Children in Sport that the Sports Council insist upon, liasing with the ICPSA for the shotgun merit badge, and so on; in the case of the alumni, collating all the information that new graduates would need to remain actively shooting and proactively distributing it to them, and so on); while on the ground the coaches would run the actual training and so on. The NTSA committee consists of eight people at full strength, don't forget, they can't run everything, and shouldn't.
(I'd personally argue that they've taken this attitude a tad too far, but that's probably just me being a bollix again...)

BlackDot

The pony club is a good source of people there's no doubt about that but the biggest block for the NTSA is not really commitment but Clubs. Some UCD members have also been working with the Pony Club in the further reaches of the country, not to mention the years Dave Cooney has spent assisting them but currently the NTSA covers about 3 counties and the Pony Club the full 26. Until we can solve this problem we will never be able to tap either the scouts or pony club effeciently.

As to changing the competition to 30 shot I rather feel we should make better use of the 40 shot competition that juniors are supposed to shoot and not let them shoot 60.

As to prone, UCD already shoots 10m prone as the equestian club train for the college tetrathlon but most clubs ie WTSC if they train prone have to get their shooters to lie on table - not the best way to shoot, I did it myself, it is rather distracting as you're worrying more about whether the table will colapse than where the rifle is pointing. I'm all for 2P competitions but its the hardware thats the block for most clubs - you'ld almost need two sets of back stops for each firing point.

There are some lovely ideas but the solutions are not as simple as they seem and at the moment some parts of the NTSA are pushing to split us further away from the pony club by considering pulling out of the SSAI.