What do college basketball coaches and Junior High Power coaches have in common?
Both of them have to recruit to keep top performers in their program, and FWRR is no exception. Our best source of new Junior shooters is the DeKalb County 4-H shooting sports program. 4-H shooters go through BB gun, air rifle, air pistol, archery and .22 rimfire shooting classes and after they complete these classes, many of them want to continue shooting in a more advanced formal program.
FWRR member Patrick Jessup heads up the DeKalb 4-H .22 rimfire program and last summer he invited FWRR representatives to come out to a 4-H shooting session and make a presentation about the FWRR Junior program. Larry Beardsley and Mia King made a pitch to the group and Mr. Jessup gave us a list of prospective shooters. We followed up with the prospects and decided that we had enough interest to hold a class for prospective 4-H shooting sports graduates.
We set October 12 as a date that worked for everyone and we worked on a class curriculum. We decided that the CMP GSM class met our needs and we did some modifications to focus on the AR rifles we shoot in our Junior program. We have a diverse and capable set of Juniors and we decided that the Juniors would have a major role in presenting this class to give back to the Junior program. Mia King is a 4-H Instructor and a Certified NRA Pistol Instructor and Tayt Shaffer, our youngest Junior, is willing to try anything (well, at least once) and they agreed to help with the class.
We divided up the CMP curriculum and Mia took the parts dealing with Preparing the shot, Breathing, Trigger Control and getting into the actual positions. Since I am way too stiff to bend into the positions, Tayt was our model – demonstrating different aspects of the Offhand, Sitting and Prone positions.
We had a very good turnout for the class; six students and three parents were present. We welcomed parents because we want them to know just what we are doing with our program. The classroom session went very well and after lunch, we had a shooting session. While the students ate lunch, we zeroed three rifles at 100-yards and we had the students shoot from sandbags to work on operation of the AR rifles, practice trigger control and get used to using a scoped rifle instead of open sights.
Each student shot 20-rounds in their practice session and the emphasis was in shooting a good group – not necessarily putting everything in the X-ring. In summary – every student shot good groups and several beat up the black on the target pretty badly.
After the shooting session we did a class survey and we good high marks for how the class went. Every student said that they would like to continue shooting over the winter, so we have a plan to go forward with this new group of shooters.
We start Winter Offhand on November 9th. After the “old guys” finish Winter Offhand, about 10 o’clock, we will meet with the prospective shooters (we’ll call them The Class of ’25). We will have a class session and then a shooting session to follow up with the start we have made with this group of new shooters.
And, as college basketball coaches often do – we’ll declare that we had a great recruiting season.