TWO terms of intensive training for the NEGS Target Rifle Club will hopefully pay off when they compete at the annual Fiona Reynolds All Schools and AAGPS Rifle Shooting Premiership matches held in Sydney in July.
The club trains each week at both the TAS Smallbore Range and Wollomombi Fullbore Range. Nine girls have signed up for the annual training camp at Wingham Range beginning 7 July, and will travel on to Sydney to shoot in competitions against other school teams, all drawn from GPS boys schools, including TAS, King’s, Grammar, Sydney High, Newington, Scot’s and Shore.
The training camp involves living in on the range and shooting daily at ranges from 300 to 600 metres, coached by some of Australia’s best shooters, including Queen’s Prize winner Tony Moon, his wife Wendy, who is a member of the Australian Palma Team, as well as coaches from the Australian National Team, and NSW Country Under 25 Team.
The girls shoot both “deliberate” stages with fixed targets and a 300-metre “snap” stage in which the serving tray sized target is revealed for five second intervals. Competition will continue in any weather – frost, wind and rain, so training will be likewise.
Fullbore rifle shooting has a long tradition in Australia, and indeed all Commonwealth countries, and is almost unique in being totally age and gender neutral.
The girls will shoot toe to toe with their male contemporaries and have no problems at all handling .308 and .223 target rifles.
The first match is at Anzac Range Malabar, with up to 12 teams of five drawn from all the shooting schools in NSW shooting at 300, 500 and 600 metres in the challenging conditions of the headland range.
The match is named in memory of NEGS Old Girl, Senior Prefect and rifle shooter, Fiona Reynolds, who succumbed to cancer in 2007, but who shot in the match during her school career.
The team will then move to Hornsby Range to shoot alongside in the GPS Premiership. Teams of eight shooters will compete in three first eight matches and one second eight match. NEGS vies for trophies in concurrent matches with Shore, TAS and Sydney High School. In previous years, NEGS shooters have shot the best individual score and been rated in the top 12 best shots on the range.
This year the team looks forward to school principal, Mr Clive Logan attending the AAGPS matches on Wednesday, followed by the TAS-High-NEGS presentation afternoon tea and later dinner with the Shore Rifle Club.
