Syracuse.com - Syracuse Pistol Club offers winter shooting league

[HuntingNY-News]

" What we do with a new shooter is pair them up with an experienced shooter who will help guide them through the process," said Kurt Brown, the club's president.

It comes down to improving a person’s “shooting proficiency” and the camaraderie.

That’s the main focus of the Syracuse Pistol Club’s winter shooting leagues, which meets Wedneday morning and evenings at the club’s indoor range on Henry Clay Boulevard in Clay.

It’s not for everyone in the club, though, which boasts more than 375 members.

“We have a lot of members who stop by and shoot informally,” said Kurt Brown, the club’s president. “A lot of people are intimidated by the fact that we call it a league, that it’s regimented and that there’s a scoring system. People worry about performance anxiety, that they won’t stack up.”

Brown emphasizes, though, that whether it’s shooting, skiing or golf, “everyone has to start somewhere” and that competitive handgun shooting is a lot of fun.

“What we do with a new shooter is pair them up with an experienced shooter who will help guide them through the process,” he said.

The 18-week indoor leagues, which boasts some 80 shooters, has participants ranging in age from 18 to nearly 90, Brown said.

The club offers 12 shooting lanes, with shooters aiming at paper targets 50 feet away. The leagues are run according to an National Rifle Association-approved format, with each shooter taking 30 shots each match.

The competitors are on teams with names like Golddiggers, Blue Knights, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Blasters, X-men and Aces and Eights.

The matches are broken down to three “phases” of shooting. The first is a warm-up phase, where competitors have 10 minutes to fire 10 shots. That’s followed by the second phase, where fire two rounds of five shots – both times taking no more than 20 seconds.

The final phase involves two rounds of quickly squeezing off five shots, both within 10 seconds.

A bull’s-eye is 10 points, with the concentric circles around it have decreasing lesser values. A perfect score is 300.

The league allows use of a wide variety of firearms, ranging from .22 to .45 calibers. Magnums are not allowed.

Brown emphasized that shooting safety is ingrained in all the club’s members, and that the club puts newcovers through its own three-hour safety course to cover all the bases.

Peter Poirier, of Liverpool, said he likes the winter pistol league because he can shoot all winter, “out the winter chill.”

Brown said the league is composed mostly of men. “We don’t have as many women as we’d like and we’d like to see more.”

Liz Carpenter, also of Liverpool, has been shooting in the league for three years.

“The guys took me under their wings and I learned so much,” she said. “I’d love to see more women involved. If we had a nice little women’s league we could give the guys a run for their money.”

More about the Syracuse Pistol Club:

The club’s indoor and outdoor pistol and rifle shooting leagues are open to members and non-members. Annual dues are $85 a year and an NRA membership is required. Members 65 and older are charged $40 for annual dues, as are family members of a current club member. For more, see the club's Web site.

View the full article on The Syracuse Outdoors Blog