TargetTalk

The club I am involved in would like to host the first California 4-H State shooting match (as far as we know). The disciplines would include smallbore rifle, Air rifle, skeet and trap shotgun, pistol and bow. I am looking for directions and suggestions, any thing that you can provide would be a great help. What has worked for your club, what has not worked, and were there changes made to the program to improve the matches. This will be a large undertaking by this club if we can pull this together.

you can leave a message for me here or e-mail me at tims@britzinc.com

Thanks in advance!

valencia County in NM hosts a match with all disciplines to use as our state qualifier. We also invite all the counties to participate and usually have a pretty good turnout.

One thing that we do (as well as does our state qualifier match) is select only two of the three 4-H discipline events ..... i.e. in Air and Smallbore Rifle we shoot the 3-P event and the silhouette event. This helps to save time as you really will have some difficulty in getting all three events in over a regular weekend. If you went Fri-Sun maybe, but getting a range for 3 days can be difficult and maybe expensive.

Our county event is shot in 1-1/2 days Sat & 1/2 Sunday.

I'd recommend a dedicated soring team of a minimum of three people, a stats person on a computer and then ....

SAFETY ..... SAFETY ..... SAFETY ..... 1 range officer for every 10 firing points .... this means that on popular events (depending on your range capacity) you may need 4 RO's on the line. One of those is probably the discipline director. Minimum, plan on needing 2-3 adults to act as RO's for each discipline. These should have a good grasp of safety fundamentals for the discipline, and preferably are active project leaders for those disciplines.

1) When are you planning on holding the event? Ours is at the end of March and our first planning meeting is this coming Monday (Oct 15)
You'll need to reserve (and negotiate fees) for whatever range you use. We use the Albuquerque City range and usually need 3 of the bermed ares (30-40 points per area)

2) Personal Message me with your email address and I'll send you our program from last year.

A state match is a big undertaking ... You need to get volunteer commitments early.

jhmartin
My e-mail address is tims@britzinc.com
The club must be lucky. The board of directors where all of out county 4-H shoots wants to hold this event. Range cost $0.00 :) Your posting suggest one discipline per weekend? This might work better for all of the volunteers and the range. I would like to have a program. The nice thing about our area is the heat does not get to us until June, most years. We are looking at late May to early June.

I look forward to what ever you are going to send.

Tim .... we do it all on one weekend

That's why you need so many volunteers.

If all you can gather to be safe makes you shoot on multiple weekends, I'd do that than try and cram it all in and possibly let safety slide....

I have been a volunteer working with the Va. State 4-H Shoot for over 20 years. We hold all events on one long weekend and may also be the only state shoot where most of the participants are housed and fed on-site (Holiday Lake 4-H Educational Center in Appomattox, Va., www.ext.vt.edu/resources/4h/holiday/). The competition includes both squadded and unsquadded events. The squadded events are 3-P .22 rifle, 3-P air rifle, air pistol, skeet, target archery and muzzleloading rifle. The unsquadded events are BB rifle, silhouette (.22 rifle, .22 pistol, air rifle and air pistol), .22 target pistol, field target air rifle and Seneca Run (running, tomahawk throw, knife throw, archery, muzzleloading rifle, rowing and fire starting). Participants can enter as many events as they wish (some enter as many as 6 or 7). We charge a single $14 entry fee regardless of the number of events entered (there are separate fees for housing and meals). This year we had just over 200 competitors.

On the Center property we have a covered 27 point 50 yard range, a covered 25 point 100 yard range, a covered 10 point air gun range, a 10 point 40 yard archery range, a portable BB range, a poratable air gun range and 2 overlaid American trap/skeet fields. The Center can also house and feed 250 people.

Volunteers are the key, both before and during the match. Target frames need to be built, targets purchased, awards purchased, volunteers recruited, program written & distributed and entries taken (due 2 weeks before the shoot). Squadding is a real challenge. We try and mix the competitors up so they are not always with the same people. Some counties send as few as one person while others have as many as 25. We try and accomodate all special squadding requests (such as gun sharing). Events have varying times of 30, 45, 60, 75 or 90 minutes. Time has to be built into each shooter's schedule for transit time between events, for lunch and for the unsquadded events. On the days of the shoot I would guess that we have about 50 volunteers. Shooting is from 9am to 6pm on Saturday and 8am to 1pm on Sunday. Award ceremony is at 3pm Sunday.