Seeley Lake shooters Justin Thomas, Ibby Lorentz and Sam Weisenburger.
SEELEY LAKE - The Hellgate Junior Shooters set lofty goals and they are well on the way to realizing them. The Junior Precision Rifle Team has been practicing hard since they came back from the Winter Air Gun matches in Colorado Springs at the Olympic Training Center. Building upon these experiences, the team has committed themselves to very high levels of achievement, in particular, they targeted Nationals at both the Olympic Training Center and Camp Perry, OH.
The team practices two nights a week at the Hellgate Civilian Shooters indoor range in West Riverside near Bonner, Mont. At home they practice sight picture and trigger control drills and shoot air rifles in their own home ranges. They compete in matches nearly every weekend starting in January and going through April. They also continue to practice when the season is over.
These juniors are seeing results from all this training. Justin Thomas (Seeley Lake), Alex Weisenburger (Florence) and Ibby Lorentz (Seeley Lake) have all received first round invitations to the National Junior Olympics to be held at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo. Thomas will compete in both .22 and air rifle; Weisenburger in .22; and Lorentz in air rifle.
Sam Weisenburger (Seeley Lake) missed his invitation by two points but is still ranked sixth in the nation as a sub-junior.
The path to being ready for national level competition includes local and state matches. Thomas won the Mid-Winter Classic a 3-position small bore match in January. Lorentz won this year's Shutzenfest, a 100 shot standing match. These matches and others are "open" meaning the competitors are not just juniors but adults (and coaches as well).
Lately the Juniors have been out-shooting the coaches and many other shooters as well. The junior team won the Shutzenfest match. Coach Gary Swartz commented, "The Hellraizers - Ibby, Abby (Donald), Alex (Weisenburger) and Sarah (Donald) - won the team match by two points out of 4,000 points!! Who says that every shot is not important?"
The Hellgate Junior Shooters have also out-shot juniors from across the country in "Postal Matches." While "shooting a postal" sounds ominous, a postal match is one where a competition is held at your home range and the targets are mailed via the US Postal Service to be scored and ranked against other competitors from across the country. S. Weisenburger took first in the Civilian Markmanship Program (CMP) National Postal earning an individual invitation to Regionals in Sandy, Utah.
Shooting a Postal has opened the door for other Hellgate Juniors to compete in the regional air rifle matches in Sandy, Utah as well. Another "Postal" hosted by the American Legion proved very competitive. Two team members from Montana made the semi-finals, Lorentz for Precision Air Rifle and Jonna Warnken (Superior) for Sporter air rifle.
This April in Sandy, Utah, seven of the nine Hellgate Junior team members will be part of 180 shooters from 17 states competing in the CMP Air Rifle match.
"This will be the first out of state match for some of our kids and they will need to overcome the pressure and tune out the distractions to shoot well," noted coach Trace Weisenburger.
The National Junior Olympics are even more competitive. Electronic targets are used at regional and national matches - there are no paper targets down range. These electronic targets have sensors that plot where the shot goes to within 1/10th of a millimeter.
The shot is displayed on a screen beside the shooter, on monitors for the spectators and online. This can increase the pressure on the shooter knowing that any number of spectators are watching your every shot. And for those of us behind the firing line, it's pretty nice that friends and family across the country can watch the match live.
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