15th Annual Delaware River Classic
M&M Sporting Clays, Pennsville, NJ
any time you pull into a tournament before dawn, and start to worry there won’t be enough light for your start time, is a good day, although it turned out my first shoot was shot looking directly into the sun. note to self, NEVER shoot an 8am start, if they can’t change your start time, don’t shoot the event. take the time to wake up. i tried to do this by getting up at 5. there was no warm up open this early, my first target of the day was in competition.
shot my first FITASC event. i got my ass kicked even though all the targets seemed hitable, i was really put to the test, and i failed, the first parcour looked directly into the sun. it made it difficult, but i honestly cannot say it cost me targets, i shot a 16 of 25. the second parcour was through the woods overlooking a small pond, the targets were really hard, at least for me, i shot an 11 of 25. 27 of 50, ouch. FITASC may not be for me.
main event. had my usual rough start, i never seem to get on my shit till half way through a tournament day. maybe i need to shoot 100 targets before the comp starts, not sure how to fix this. i dropped so many targets at stations i should be running. one station i thought i was hitting them when i wasn’t and i had no idea how to correct, i also lost the targets in the trees a little, but i think it was more due to my eyes themselves, i shoot right handed, yet am left eye dominant, so i am one of those ridiculous looking people with tape on their shooting glasses trying to correct, so i often lose targets going left to right pretty easily. especially if they are going really fast, low and through back lit trees. on the other hand, anthony matarese jr had set some pretty technical, intimidating looking stations that i shockingly found a joy to shoot. i stepped into the box, viewed them, got nervous, called pull, focused and found more then i expected, even running a station that scared me the most. damn, can that boy throw targets that only appear easy, lull you to sleep, then laugh at you when you miss.
i shot a 72 of 100. not really any better then the same event the year before, even though i shoot in a class one step higher now. i was almost too embarrassed to hand in my score card (yet again). then i looked at the scoreboard, all the scores were surprisingly low, not only in my class, but all the classes. the scoreboard showed me in 2nd place overall for the main event and 3rd place for FITASC with over half the shooters done. wow. so i stood around for almost 2.5h waiting to see the scores come in, posting after posting, it held, 2nd place main, 3rd FITASC, that would mean $ won and more importantly, trophies, two trophies actually, awesome. (my main motivation is winning trophies, silly, yet true). then, just minutes before i had to leave to get the rental car back in time, the last posts went up, FUCK. 4th place main, 4th place FITASC, no $, no trophy for either event, i knew i should of gone home right away, i hadn’t shot deservingly and let the low scores of others give me false hope, but c’mon, 4th, just one place out of the $ and trophies in both events, FUCK. this is a big kick in the balls not only for being the ugly girl at the dance, but because i shot the exact same score as those one place higher then me, we had tied, so it went to the tie break stations, they just shot the targets better at one stand, but we still had the same score, FUCK. (turns out however, because we had tying scores and because of the number of C class shooters, i still got 3rd place punches, so 2 punches, that makes 3 punches in C class, i now have 3 of the 6 to needed for B class, nice).
time to drive home and try not to cry, i go to nationals in 3 days, an entirely new opportunity to embarrass myself, or of course, win a trophy.
