My High School Sport

In high school I was on a team not to many schools in New York offer to their kids. I was a member of the rifle team. Not many people can say they have a gun range in their schools basement under the library. It wasn’t a very popular sport among my classmates, but I joined to see what it was all about. How the sport works is we shoot in three positions prone, offhand and kneeling. In each position we shot at a target down range at 50 feet at a target containing 12 circles, the two middle ones are your sighting circles used to sight in your gun, and the remaining 10 were the ones that counted. You are only allowed 10 shots outside the sight circles and them 10 count towards that targets school with a perfect score being a 100. So each shooters score is out of 100. During a match there’s 8 people per team that shoot, and of them 8 the top 5 shooters per each team count as the teams total score. Whichever team has the best combined 5 shooters score wins the match. We shoot 22 caliber completive rifles mostly made by a gun company from Germany named Anschutz. But we also have air rifle matches as well the 22 caliber ones. These matches are fairly similar the only difference is you shoot three targets all in the prone position and the target is only 35 feet away instead of 50 feet. At sections the test team for 22 and air rifle get to go to states which are held each year at West Point Military Academy. There instead of scoring each target by hand like the team captains have to every match, West Point ranges are all electronic so the match is scored electronically. The spectators can watch every shot on a computer screen outside the range so they know how everyone’s doing. This is what I did in high school and rifle taught us a lot about teamwork and respect for firearms. Without totally team respect this sport could easily be eliminated from schools all over.