TargetTalk

first batches of pics are up
http://www.pilk-uns.com/picsU/ncaa07.htm

Where can we find the scores for the NCAA Rifle championships? Are they being posted online anywhere?

Nice photos as always...

Thanks!

Look Here:

http://www.ncaasports.com/rifle/champio ... ts/nc/2007

Nanooks win 8th national rifle title in front of hundreds of fans

By Margaret Friedenauer
Staff Writer
Published March 11, 2007

More than 1,000 people turned out Saturday to the NCAA Rifle Championships at University of Alaska Fairbanks, the largest crowd ever for the national event.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks won the championship again, their eighth title in nine years.

Perhaps those most surprised by the crowd were the athletes themselves.

“You’re not really paying attention to what’s going on behind you, so I wasn’t really aware until I turned around,” said senior Kristina Fehlings of the University of Nebraska. “It’s really neat. I was taking pictures just of the crowd.”

Fehlings said the largest crowd she remembers at a previous rifle event was last year’s NCAA championships in Colorado that brought in 200 spectators.

“And before that, there weren’t any crowds,” she said.

One spectator in particular raised eyebrows. Several visiting athletes were surprised when Gov. Sarah Palin was introduced during the awards ceremony. She earned a hearty laugh and applause when she touted her interest in hunting and rifle sports.

“I see a gentleman with a (National Rifle Association) hat over there,” she said addressing the crowd. “A man after my own heart.”

In an individual, mentally challenging sport, where the least amount of movement and action from an athlete earns the highest marks, rifle sports were never known for being spectator friendly. But new technology has allowed the intensity of the sport to cast a net over the crowd and draw them into the suspense of competition.

Instead of paper targets, on which the crowd had difficulty seeing the accuracy of the shooter, the championship event used equipment that could register each shot from each competitor and project the results on large screens for spectators. The accuracy and score for each shot was displayed seconds after it was fired and it was easy to follow the progression of the competition. Paper was also used to register each shot as a sort of hard copy of the competition.

Associate athletic director for UAF, Patrick Lee, said the university upgraded equipment, like the electronic targets, to make the event more spectator friendly. The upgrades make the event more real-time and easier to follow, which was important since it was the first NCAA championship to come to UAF, he said.

“We anticipated a crowd this large,” he said. “They didn’t let us down.”

Not unfamiliar to the crowd seats were parents and families of the competitors. Some families, like the Fehlings, have traveled to many competitions to support their athlete. Allan and Joan Fehlings traveled from Washington D.C. for their daughter Kristina’s final collegiate competition. Kristina’s grandmother, Carol Fehlings, also came to Fairbanks from Washington state, having never seen a collegiate rifle competition. She was impressed by the accuracy and discipline of the sport, she said.

“And they never miss it,” she said, adding that was amazed at how small the target it. “That to me is quite spectacular.”

As a spectator, the competitions are “extremely nerve racking,” said Allan. But as a Nebraska fan, a state university with fans better known for their passionate exuberance and vocal rooting for Cornhusker college football, Allan added the quiet tenseness at the rifle competitions is riveting.

“I think it’s a more civilized sport,” he said with a wink. “Shooters tend to be good sportsman.”

The crowd was compared to that at a tennis match or on a golf course rather than more boisterous sport like basketball or hockey. People quietly tiptoed through the creaky bleachers to find seats, quickly silencing small children and stifling sneezes. Dozens of pink signs warned that any ringing cell phones would result in their owner being removed from the building.

But for most, the near motionless event didn’t equate to boredom. Kim Roth said she didn’t realize she’d been watching her daughter, Erica Burnham, for two hours during the fourth relay. Roth never got up to stretch or fetch a beverage or snack. She looked mostly relieved and exhausted after the relay.

“That was nerve-wracking,” she said.

But she countered that Burnham was probably more nervous than the 13 family members who came to watch. Burnham shoots for Tennessee Technological University but grew up in Tok. Kim and her husband, John Burnham, were wearing “Tok Rifle” sweatshirts and were thrilled to be seeing their daughter in a collegiate competition for the first time. The couple traveled to Fairbanks with Burnham’s grandparents, cousins, family friends and Tok rifle coach and his wife, John and Betty Zabielski.

Burnham was excited to have a fan-base present, but also nervous to be shooting in front of her family and old coach, Roth said of her daughter. She could tell Burnham was disappointed in her score, added Roth.

“But she did well for having all of us here watching her like this,” Roth said. “Maybe next year we’ll go see her, but we won’t tell her we’re there in the crowd.”

Perhaps most impressed with the advance in technology and crowd-pleasing excitement was members of the UAF women’s rifle team from the early 1960s. The women in 1961 were the first UAF rifle team to bring home a national championship.

Tim Middleton of Anchorage was on the men’s team at that time. When he heard the NCAA championships were coming to Fairbanks, he rallied alumni from those early rifle teams to travel north. Linda Dahl Gordon, who lives in Fairbanks but spends the winters in Arizona, took some convincing, but eventually agreed to join Judi Pattinson Wells of Tacoma, Diane Miller of Anchorage, and Kathie Powers of Denver to visit their old haunt and see how the sport had change.

“Those suits are amazing,” Gordon said, referring to the stiff shooting uniforms the athletes wear to help keep them immobile and their shooting precise. “We just had canvas jackets with padding on the shoulder.”

“We just had to use our own muscles to stay still,” Wells said.

The women talked about the “dark, danky range” the rifle team had then in a building on campus, long since demolished before the Patty Center was built in 1963. They used small bore .22 caliber target rifles and paper targets.

Wells recalled that in 1960, the women’s team - they competed separately from the men then - took part in a postal match, where instead of gathering different schools in one location for an event, shooters competed on paper targets and mailed the targets to judges that scored them. Several weeks later the women were notified that they won the national intercollegiate postal match.

“That’s when the school said, ‘Oh, I guess the women can do something,’” Wells said, and the team traveled to compete in, and win, the national championship the next year.

But Saturday’s event was vastly different from those days of the rifle team, and Gordon thinks the crowd-friendly event is going to gain steam.

“I think it’s really going to grow, as a spectator sport and grow in interest,” she said, watching the venue from the upper bleachers of the Patty Center. “I think this is a hoot.”

Ready, aim, fire

By Tim Mowry
Staff Writer
Published March 9, 2007

March Madness arrived in Fairbanks this week, but it’s bullets, not basketballs, that have everyone bouncing off the wall.

The NCAA Rifle Championships begin today at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the first time the school and city has played host to a national collegiate championship event.

In a town — and state — where guns and shooting are a big deal, hosting the NCAA Rifle Championships is huge.

“It’s the greatest thing to happen for shooting that’s ever happened in this community,” gushed Joe Nava, who, as the Alaska representative for the National Rifle Association and president of the UAF rifle team’s booster club, is one of Fairbanks’ most avid shooters.

This weekend’s championships in Fairbanks are to collegiate riflery what the Final Four is to college basketball, Nava said.

“It just happens to be a different sport,” he said.

Instead of basketball powerhouses like Duke, North Carolina, UCLA and Kansas, though, it’s perennial rifle powers like Army, Murray State, Kentucky and UAF that will be shooting it out for the championship trophy.

UAF has won seven of the last eight national rifle titles and the Nanooks are the overwhelming favorite to carve another notch in their gun stocks this weekend.

Whether or not having the rifle championships in Fairbanks will provide the Nanooks with a home-range advantage, however, remains to be seen. While the team doesn’t have to contend with travel and gets to shoot on their own range, there is also added pressure to shoot well at home, said UAF coach Dan Jordan.

“This is the match everybody looks forward to all year,” said Jordan, who isn’t worried about his squad crumbling under hometown pressure. “It’s a big deal to the shooters and the schools.”

It’s a big deal for UAF, too.

It’s not every day that a Division II school hosts a Division I national championship event, noted former UAF rifle coach and athletic director Randy Pitney, who was chairman of the local organizing committee.

Pitney, who was an All-American shooter at UAF from 1968-72 before taking over the program in the mid-1980s and building it into a national powerhouse, has always dreamed of hosting the NCAA rifle championships in Fairbanks.

“It’s finally happened,” said Pitney, who retired as coach in 2001 after UAF won its fourth straight NCAA title. He served as athletic director until 2003. “It’s something a lot of people have put a lot of effort into for a lot of years. It’s really great for Fairbanks.”

All the niceties aside, who wants to watch a bunch of people shooting air rifles and .22s at targets, which some people would say is as exciting as watching paint dry.

But UAF has gone to great lengths to make the event more spectator friendly. The school invested $60,000 for electronic targets that allow the targets to be displayed on video screens so fans can see each shot and tell who’s winning.

The air rifle competition on Saturday will be held in the Patty Center gym and the targets will be displayed on two 25-foot screens that will allow spectators to see every shot. Scores will be announced after each round of shots so fans can keep track of who’s ahead and cheer for their favorite shooters.

“To be able to see what people are shooting makes a huge difference,” said Jordan, the UAF coach and former All-American. “When it comes down to Saturday night and each school has one person at the line and you can be watching shot by shot to see how it adds up … it’s going to be very fan friendly.”

Army coach Ron Wigger agreed.

“The air rifle setup here is really outstanding,” he said after Thursday’s practice round. “It adds an international flavor to it.”

The country’s top guns are impressed with what they’ve seen at UAF thus far.

“I think the setup is really great,” said Army sharpshooter Chris Abalo, who is expected to contend for both the smallbore and air rifle titles while helping the Cadets challenge the Nanooks for the team title.

Defending air rifle champion Kristina Fehlings from the University of Nebraska is no stranger to Fairbanks, having shot here three other times during her collegiate career.

“It’s one of the best ranges in the country,” Fehlings said.

She is especially excited about shooting in front of a big crowd in the Patty Center gym, where the air rifle competition will be held.

“I think it’s awesome,” she said of the spectator-friendly setup in the Patty gym. “When I saw it, it was like, man, I want to get out there and shoot now, which is not a normal reaction.”

UAF officials are hoping to attract a big crowd for Saturday’s air rifle championships. As of Thursday, more than 400 tickets had been sold for Saturday’s daylong air rifle competition and school officials are hoping for a crowd of 600 or more for the individual championships beginning at 5:30 p.m.

“People that go will enjoy it and learn a lot,” Nava said. “It’s a very exciting finals event.”

Contact staff Writer Tim Mowry at 459-7587 or tmowry@newsminer.com.

A great press release from Tim Mowry - congratulations!.

Raises the point that we should be preparing a press release for every competition, and sending out to EVERY paper, radio station, and TV station in the area.

Sure, most of the time it will end up in the circular filing cabinet, BUT if you don't send it out it definitely will not get used.

Spencer

An excellent write up for sure. Makes me want to go to Alaska (even if I don't shoot rifle).

Finals and awards pictures are up now.


http://www.pilk-uns.com/picsU/ncaa07.htm

Scott ... thanks for the photos ..... the press releases were great, but the photos really show what a spectacular event this must have been.

A few of my shooters are now saying .... "well, maybe Alaska ain't all that cold"