Clay Target Shooting - Nationals
The first weekend of the holidays saw our A and B teams head to Christchurch for the National Championships. This was a three-day shoot with the South Island DTL champs on Saturday, The national DTL champs on Sunday then both the South Island and National Skeet champs on Monday. In total there were well over 300 individual competitors with 62 teams from 38 different schools.
Saturday saw the teams not do so well but some great individual efforts. Highlights being Max Edwards who won the South Island Points Score event and Jack Gibbs, from the B team, gain third ( boys ) in the Single Barrel.
The national champs on Sunday saw the A team place 5th - ahead of all the other Super 8 schools. In doing so they equalled their second best team score of the season. Over the two days seven of our 10 boys shot at least one ‘possible’ to qualify for a shoot-off.
Representative teams are chosen by Fish and Game region. Two of our shooters made the Wellington team – Max Edwards and Richard Simpson.
While our top skeet shooters finished just outside the individual placings Max Edwards and Tate Ferguson won the South Island two-man-teams event and Max was the South Island combined DTL and Skeet champion.
In summary all of the boys put every effort into their season. They all shot to, or above, their potential and that is all we can ask. When you put your best effort up and someone is better than that on the day, then good luck to them. Looking ahead we are not unlike the All Blacks in that we have a large base of talent that has now been built up. This will create real pressure to make our top two teams neat year. This can only be a good thing. Mr Higgie strongly believes that with another year of experience, which breeds all important confidence, the up and down ‘rollercoaster’ effect will flatten out and we will be a very hard team to beat.
