McAuliffe Shield 2018 Pennant Season

The East Central District Rifle Association began its 2018 pennant season with its first loss in a long time. The McAuliffe Shield first round match of the pennant season was against Karramomus last Saturday at the Violet Town range.  The day was just about perfect with bright clear light, no dust, no rain and yes there was the Violet Town wind. The ECDRA shooters were very confident that their recent practice sessions had helped the wind coaches better read the conditions.  Geoff James our senior coach needed all his 60 odd years of experience to best judge the impact of the wind on the score. The shoot did prove to be a great learning event for both shooters and coaches and back at the club house over a cuppa it was agreed that it was these conditions  that gives the sport its unique challenges.

This year there is a new pennant the “Avenel Trophy” that will combine both the short range pennant 500 and 600 yards and the long range pennant 800 to 1000 yards where the various classes of shooting are combined using a special indexing system.  It will be interesting to see how it runs and it will be a chance to dust off an old Trophy donated by the Tehan family that used to be shot by teams from a similar area in the 60’s.

Back to the McAuliffe Shield pennant on Saturday.  The match started slowly with only one  possible by Richard Wall from Karramomus, being shot by either team for the first 500 yards.   The second stage at 500 yards showed a marked improvement in scores but it was only Karramomus who could come up with possibles.  By stage three the tables had turned with Marty Kelly from ECDRA shooting the only possible.  The recovery was too late and the Karramomus five shooter team won the match with 895 points to the ECDRA”s 878 points.  A close match.

However the tables were turned for the Avenel Trophy where the ECDRA took the points 1272.9 to Karramomus’s 1250.5.  The difference in numbers is due to the system that tries to standardize scores from one discipline to another. The different types of shooting are very different with some different skills required even the target and scoring are different. The end result is that no system can really every create a true comparison of scores.