RJ’s Report: USA Shooting Nationals, Day 2
By Rick Johnson Jr
Rick Johnson is at the USA Shooting Nationals at Ft Benning GA in his capacity as MA State Jr Team coach and will be providing his perspective on the events as they unfold.
I would like to offer all the pronematch.com readers my apology for neglecting some fine shooters from New England. Hap correctly pointed out my errors in geography when I only included New England shooters from MA and NH. Apparently Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine and Vermont are still part on New England. Tom Csenge from NH, Kim Chrostowski is from RI while Josie Burzynski, Claudia Duksa and Libby Tallberg are from CT and there may be others I just don’t know about.
Today the men started day 1 of their air rifle event and the women had day 1 of the 3×20 event. Having the weather back home be unseasonably cool makes the heat and humidity feel even worse here. Luckily for the air rifle shooters there is some air conditioning in their range not so for the 50 meter range. It is just hot and sweaty in that tin can.
I’m going to limit my synopsis to one shooter today, Kim Coffey. That is what a 22 hour car ride will do to you. Kim showed some of her soccer team Captain skills today by gritting out a difficult performance. Throughout the day I watched her shoot 95% of the time. Her prone was real solid. Nice tight groups centered on the 10 ring. However, she dropped 2 8’s at 6 and 7 o’clock. She ended up with a 192. We talked about it between equipment changes and I just chalked it up to ammo. One of the shots she called slightly low the other one was a solid inner ten. Not what she expected but still OK. Now on to standing.
After getting set up she was taking tons of sighters and using up valuable time. In watching her I could not figure out what was going on. The shots were either falling in the 9 or 10 ting or 6-7 ring. This is not good. She left the line to talk to me several times. We could not figure out what was going on. She ended up shooting a sub-par 167. Kneeling was another story all together. Time was running short so a quick equipment change and it off to the races. She took a good amount of time getting settled and then just ran off a solid 188 kneeling in about 12 minutes. It was real nice to watch. Kim finished the day with a disappointing 547 but I’m hopeful that the good kneeling performance will carry through tomorrows 3×20 match.
Sarah Scherer fired a 567 for 17th place 8 points off the leader Jamie Beyerle. Rena Goodwin fired a 550 with a nice standing score of 185.Tom Csenge shot a 585 to get 12th place while Bobby Mangaudis fired a nice 570 in air rifle to land him in 44th place.
Complete results are below.
Check-in with you all tomorrow, I’m tired. –Rick
Rick Johnson Jr is the MA Junior State Team coach, competitive smallbore shooter, and contributor to pronematch.com
