by Hap Rocketto
I am getting a little long in the tooth but I work to stay in competitive shape for position shooting. I shoot two winter position leagues and specialize in prone during the summer months, with a little four position centerfire league thrown in to leaven the mix.
Deep down inside I hope to replicate my 2002 tour de force. That year I turned 55 and moved into the intermediate senior category. I had not shot position at Perry since 1993 and thought that I might make a move on the title. My goal was to shoot the position matches until I won the category championship.
To that end I started training in late April spending most of the summer shooting iron sight standing with a dose of kneeling to keep those skills sharp. My regular prone competitive schedule was enough to keep those scores at their mediocre level.
At Perry I finished second in category in the prone, standing, kneeling, and iron sight aggregate. The next day I mounted a scope and finished first in standing and second in the prone kneeling, and aggregate. However, when the scores were totaled I was first in the grand aggregate. Much to my relief and happiness there would be no need to return a second year.
So I am still swatting away at position because I am afraid that if I take even the shortest break I may lose what skills remain at too fast a rate to recover. I am about ready to begin training for an assault on the senior category title, for I am closing in on 65, in much the same manner I did for the intermediate crown. Physically I am starting to feel the accumulation of the years but, fortunately, I am mentally caught somewhere during the time when I was a pretty good position shooter. As we all know shooting is 95% mental so when that aspect is under control half the battle is won.
Never has my arrival as an elder statesman of the sport been more apparent to me then when I shot the Connecticut Three Position Championship at the Niantic Sportsman’s Club in April.
The match director was Lisette Grunwell, a former junior, who was now giving back to the sport which provided her a college scholarship and the opportunity to earn All American status. After she registered me I scurried down to the range in hopes of being one of the first two people to report to the line. If the points are unassigned I try to get there first so that I might claim either the far left or far right point; being against a wall reduces my chances of cross firing. As luck would have it I was the first and took point one on the far left and began setting up.
A thump and a clatter caused me to look up as two shooters came into the range. It was Joe Smith and his son Zach. Joe was a junior back in the late 1970s and Zach, now a sophomore in high school, is a star on the Grasso Technical High School rifle team. A team that my brother and I started about the time Zach was born. As an aside, Zach’s mother Cathy was a student of mine at Grasso in the far distant past. We waved a hearty hello to each other as we prepared for the match.
More thumping and more clattering announced the arrival of Jennifer Sloan and her son Eric. Jennifer is Joe’s kid sister and used to pester me when, too young to shoot, she would hang around the range and affix puppy dog stickers to my spotting scope-which I still have. She moved into the junior ranks and went onto college with a shooting scholarship, shot on the All Guard Team with me, and a few months ago, in her professional capacity, helped me file for Social Security. Last summer I coached her and Erik in the Mentor Match at Camp Perry. Jenn waved and smiled a greeting. The eternally bashful and shy Eric sort of waved at me before he set self-consciously to his tasks.
I was musing on these relationships when Nick Sautter hauled his gear in, said hello to all, and began to unpack. Nick is a team mate of Zach’s at Grasso. They are both coached by Shawn Carpenter, another of my former juniors who was a member of the Grasso team in the mid ‘80s which was coached by my brother, a past student of mine, and now on the faculty at Grasso and coaching the rifle program.
So there I sat, reflecting that my age made me the oldest on the line and perhaps oldest at the match. Here were three generations of shooters. I was just old enough to be the father to the oldest adults, whom I taught to shoot, and no doubt certainly aged enough to be grandfather to the younger crowd, whom I taught to shoot. It then dawned on me that they were my shooting progeny and I was, in the words of the Ancient Romans, their shooting pater familias: “father of the family”.
The pater familias was the highest ranking family status in a Roman household and the pater’s children did not have to be biological offspring. Such was the status of my range companions.
In the good old days I would have held vitae necisque potestas, the power of life and death over them, had the right to sell them into slavery, approve marriages, and a host of other discretionary powers. I guess that was all well and good, for there were times I wanted to exercise some of those powers on various members of my relay, but on this day all I wanted was to do was outshoot them and show them that I was still caput capitis canis, the top dog.
