New Dress Code Interpretation

[MLiuzza]

Why doesn't everyone just stop flaming each other over a rule? We all have our own opinions and it doesnt look like Guest or anyone else will change their minds. let the thread die.

[j-team]

j-team- I assumed you experienced it as well by the fact that you are so upset that the rule is in effect.

My 17 years as an international shooter ended in 2005, when I retired. I do still have a passion for seeing it survive.

As far back as the 2000 (maybe earlier) I know of shooters being hassled by officials over what they are wearing on the range, length of shorts etc.

What annoys me is that the ISSF are fiddling with this, the sport is dying. ISSF shooting does not appeal to the younger generation, it's seen as boring. It's a total loss for spectators (with the exception of clay target). Do they really think that shooter wearing tracksuits will change anything?

If ISSF shooting is dumped by the Olympics, it will die at an international level as the government funding that allows most, if not all, national teams to exsist will cease immediately. The fact that China win a lot of medals, might be the saviour, which is kind of sad if you think about it.

Rather than re-arranging the deckchairs on the titanic, a total revamp is required. Reactive targets, summer biathalon, man v man matches etc. But, that will never happen under the current administration. Unfortunately, they would rather sleepwalk to extinction.

And MLiuzza. No-one has resorted to insults and namecalling so why shouldn't we express our opinions. Isn't that what internet forums are for?

[Sparks]

a total revamp is required. Reactive targets, summer biathalon, man v man matches etc.

No offence intended j-team, but if I wanted reactive targets, I'd shoot reactive targets; if I wanted summer biathalon, I'd shoot summer biathalon; and if I wanted man-v-man matches, I'd take up greco-roman wrestling.

What I wanted from a sport was something that was non-contact (therefore shooting came up), didn't require you to be the physically largest, fastest or most doped (but instead focussed on how much self-control and mental focus you could bring to the party), and where it was safe and clean and pleasant.

For my money, in my personal opinion, ISSF was the best match to that, and in fifteen years, I've not regretted the choice. I love my sport as it is, and if we do what FITA did to archery, we'll get what FITA got - a sport that's a lot more commercial and where the end result at a match is not necessarily the best archer (and that's a design goal of one-on-one knockout rounds; it allows for the "upset" that makes it to the newspapers).

What could make our sport more popular is some truly new thinking. And I don't mean dress codes as ISSF are doing at the moment, and I don't mean throwing the sport we love out the window in favour of something that might be more appealing to NBC for a month, I mean throwing NBC out the window and looking to promote our sport, as it stands, using some of the newer technologies out there. You want kids in the sport? Push the sport where they listen. The ISSF website and ISSF tv are the right ideas, but they're old-school by today's kids standards. Where's the ISSF Twitter feed? The ISSF Facebook page? ISSF SMS feeds for the EU kids? What about the ISSF Youtube channel (take a peek at FITA's archery channel on youtube to see what I mean, and no, ISSF.tv doesn't count because the audience is watching Youtube, so why hide ISSF.tv away on the far side of the room in a corner?).

There are ways to address this, but you need to think far, far more ahead of the curve than "let's appeal to NBC" if you want young blood drawn into the sport in more numbers than we're getting today.

You also need to put hand in pocket, by the way. One of the best things to happen to our sport in recent years from the point of view of participation has been the development of electronic targets. We need more of them on more ranges, and then we need to start improving them. We need to be able to log into our meyton target at the range and dump our ten-shot groups as pictures onto facebook and our scores onto twitter, into iPhone apps that give us pretty graphs and rank us against others in our club. And that needs to become the new standard because it's what people did a hundred years ago on pen and paper and with club bulletin boards, and it's why we have competitions in the sport in the first place. It's why new shooters will pin good target cards up on their bedroom walls, it's why clubs will do the same on their walls, it's why we run postal matches and club leagues and rankings. We don't need to change that part, we just need to update the medium we're using from corkboards to webpages and iphone apps.

[Mike M (as guest)]

Sparks, you bring up some excellent points.

One of my collateral duties for the US International Muzzle-Loading Team is PR. It's thankless, but a good PR effort is a key to long-term success.

We don't have Twitter up, but I've got both a Web site and a Facebook page. I'll be honest, the Facebook page is a lot easier to work with. And I plan on taking the YouTube comment on board...we'll see if we can get some good video at the World Championships in August and upload it.

I'll add one other thing. STAGE some photos. I had a great opportunity to get magazine covers last year...IF I had a decent photo of one of our shooters who won gold. I didn't. Most ranges are not lit well enough for good photography. You really need to get the "beauty shot", with the shooter in good light, gun in hand, and the photographer on the left side of a right-handed pistol shooter (and in front of the firing line - it's a STAGED photo). Have a file of these ready for use.

[Sparks]

Those are all good basic things to do Mike, but I'm more thinking that what we need is to get more "Web 2.0" with the sport's PR. Take a look:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/how-to/web ... et-social/
http://www.feedmyapp.com/web_20_sport_a ... ions_sites

And look in particular at things like RunKeeper and Gyminee :
http://www.feedmyapp.com/p/a/runkeeper- ... ties/10495
http://www.feedmyapp.com/p/a/gyminee-st ... t-fit/1388

And for the individual club members, things like this:
http://www.mapmytracks.com/sports/running

That's the kind of thing I mean, the critical core change we have to make - moving away from a single central source that produces all the PR materials and towards a more distributed model where it's made easier for individual shooters to generate content than to avoid doing it (eg, you log into the electronic targets and then your shots go to a website to show off to your friends, as I mentioned earlier).

[SteveR]

Where's the ISSF Twitter feed?
The ISSF Facebook page?
What about the ISSF Youtube channel (take a peek at FITA's archery channel on youtube to see what I mean, and no, ISSF.tv doesn't count because the audience is watching Youtube, so why hide ISSF.tv away on the far side of the room in a corner?).

ISSF Twitter : http://twitter.com/ISSFsports
ISSF Facebook :http://www.facebook.com/pages/Olympic-S ... 6320374733
ISSF You Tube : http://www.youtube.com/user/ISSFTV

[MLiuzza]

Sparks, there is an ISSF Facebook page, not popular though. http://www.facebook.com/pages/ISSF/2376 ... =ts&v=wall

also, during world cups, Dave Johnson has a twitter account to update viewers on whats going on.
http://twitter.com/OlympicSho

j-team, I'm with sparks on this one. USA Shooting is for governing the United States section of Olympic Shooting sports, in particularly the summer games. If you want biathlon, go to http://biathlon.teamusa.org/ so on...

The best way to promote shooting to younger people would be to bring it into more schools and have more than just JROTC teams. Yes, JROTC teams contribute a huge sum of new shooters I know kids who want to shoot but are deterred from it because they don't want to go through everything else with JROTC to get it.

Also, promote it as an Olympic sport at the start instead of promoting only the 'fun' sides. Kids need goals and I can't tell you how many people I know who love to shoot but they never knew it was an Olympic sport so they never pursued it.

[Sparks]

ISSF Twitter : http://twitter.com/ISSFsports

That's fairly new (and now followed, thanks)

ISSF Facebook :http://www.facebook.com/pages/Olympic-S ... 6320374733

A bit buried and more used as an official outlet than a community...

ISSF You Tube : http://www.youtube.com/user/ISSFTV

That's not ISSF. I know it says ISSF, but it's not ISSF, it's done by the guy who does archerfish.org.

[Sparks]

also, during world cups, Dave Johnson has a twitter account to update viewers on whats going on.
http://twitter.com/OlympicSho

Yes, but that's not ISSF, anymore than http://10point9.ie is.
Good feed though, added to my own list.

Also, promote it as an Olympic sport at the start instead of promoting only the 'fun' sides. Kids need goals and I can't tell you how many people I know who love to shoot but they never knew it was an Olympic sport so they never pursued it.

Amen to that. If I wanted an easy sport, I'd have chosen something less demanding, and there's a wide range of those.

[SteveR]

ISSF Twitter : http://twitter.com/ISSFsports

That's fairly new (and now followed, thanks)

ISSF Facebook :http://www.facebook.com/pages/Olympic-S ... 6320374733

A bit buried and more used as an official outlet than a community...

ISSF You Tube : http://www.youtube.com/user/ISSFTV

That's not ISSF. I know it says ISSF, but it's not ISSF, it's done by the guy who does archerfish.org.

I hadn't noticed it wasn't the official ISSF one.... what about the following:

http://www.youtube.com/user/issfchannel

[Sparks]

BTW, a quick search shows at least 15 ISSF facebook pages, several of which use the ISSF logo, two of which have thousands of followers. So you can't even tell easily which is the official one.

[Sparks]

I hadn't noticed it wasn't the official ISSF one.... what about the following:
http://www.youtube.com/user/issfchannel

That's far better and it's new (it wasn't there the last time I went looking for an ISSF channel, it was created only this March). Thanks!

[David Levene]

ISSF Twitter : http://twitter.com/ISSFsports

That's fairly new (and now followed, thanks)

It's certainly been around since the electronic newsletter 28th May, and probably before.

ISSF Facebook :http://www.facebook.com/pages/Olympic-S ... 6320374733

A bit buried and more used as an official outlet than a community

Then start using it as a community.

ISSF You Tube : http://www.youtube.com/user/ISSFTV

That's not ISSF. I know it says ISSF, but it's not ISSF, it's done by the guy who does archerfish.org.

http://www.youtube.com/issfchannel

[SteveR]

I hadn't noticed it wasn't the official ISSF one.... what about the following:
http://www.youtube.com/user/issfchannel

That's far better and it's new (it wasn't there the last time I went looking for an ISSF channel, it was created only this March). Thanks!

Shows what one problem is, if people who know the sport struggle to find the sites, what chance does everyone else have. - I'm surprised they don't just list them on the issf website.

[David Levene]

That's far better and it's new (it wasn't there the last time I went looking for an ISSF channel, it was created only this March). Thanks!

Have you signed up for the ISSF electronic newsletter?

[Sparks]

That's far better and it's new (it wasn't there the last time I went looking for an ISSF channel, it was created only this March). Thanks!

Have you signed up for the ISSF electronic newsletter?

I hadn't, I was only subscribed to the print ISSF magazine. And this is the first I'm hearing of several of these things, and I've been shooting for 15 years and help run a reasonably large target shooting forum and follow two more. I don't think they're quite getting the word out there.

In fact, come to think of it, I know they have my email address because I'm an ISSF coach and I was my national governing body's secretary for a year and I have emailed them several times in the past; so why not one email from them about this?

[MLiuzza]

Another reason ISSF style shooting hasn't really taken off is because if you look at the major events where there are good venues, retailers, and top athletes 1. They're always during the school year, so no one(unless you are competing) will take off from school for a week just to watch an event or 2. Rarely if ever happen in the same country more than 1-2 times per year. By major event(from a USA standpoint) I mean World Cup USA or any other event where there are a large amount of Olympic level shooters competing. Also, they aren't 2 hour events that decide the winner. They're 4-5 hour events if you include finals....who is honestly going to stick around and watch the whole thing unless you know exactly whats going on? But once you do know whats going on and there are great shooters it is a fun event to watch.

[David Levene]

In fact, come to think of it, I know they have my email address because I'm an ISSF coach and I was my national governing body's secretary for a year and I have emailed them several times in the past; so why not one email from them about this?

I think they were possibly presuming that people interested in ISSF shooting would visit the ISSF web site occasionally and subscribe to the newsletter.

[Sparks]

I think they were possibly presuming that people interested in ISSF shooting would visit the ISSF web site occasionally and subscribe to the newsletter.

That's a fairly textbook marketing and PR mistake to be making (creating a new service and then not making any effort in launching it).

[Alexander]

ISSF Facebook :http://www.facebook.com/pages/Olympic-S ... 6320374733

A bit buried and more used as an official outlet than a community

Then start using it as a community.

Steve, Sparks and David:

This one is not only the main official Facebook presence of ISSF, maintained by their "media coordinator" Marco dalla Dea (the other one is probably a private endeavour, and is less visited, less updated, and has less followers),
but it already IS a community of sorts if you look at the "likes" list. Many internationally known shooters are already there. It was transformed into a "group" recently, because I remember when it was still a single page. I agree however that posting frequency seems low...

Alexander