A differet way . . .
I suspect our club is doing better than average, when it comes to attracting Junior Shooters. We made some changes in our course of fire 7 years ago. We gave up on shooting sanctioned matches. We shoot the USBR target and even gave up on the USBR rules.
Last Sunday we had 20 shooters and 5 of them were Juniors. Over the last several years our Junior attendance has been close to 25%. How have we managed to do this?
We changed our course of fire in a way that allows the Juniors to shoot without making the Dad double, triple or quadtruple the cost of ammunition for the match. That could be like a miniature Obama hidden tax program, if you want the kids to shoot all summer.
As some of you know, our club uses the RFC rifle classification system. It allows the kids to shoot with a factory sporter rifle and with low cost ammuition. But some of our juniors also shoot our Unlimited class.
The KEY to our success with the Juniors is use of Re-Entry Matches. All our matches are Re-Entry. Each shooter is allowed to shoot up to 4 times in each class at each range (25 & 50 yards) We use each shooter's best score at each range. Dad can allow his little darling to shoot once, or twice, but the Junior is not required to shoot a whole course of 3, 4 or 5 targets.
Shooting in the Factory Sporter class everyone must shot low cost ammo: Nothing more expensive than Wolf Match Extra or SK Match.
To keep the cost down we don't give out trophies or plaques anymore. All the winners get are bragging rights. We charge $2.00 per target, and "everyone" gets a souvienir awards badge. We have raffles for shooting related prizes.
We have a few other "secrets" we use, that has increased our attendance. We average 2 to 3 times as many shooters at our matches as the average sanctioned match. We are willing to share what we have leaned, with any club willing to try being different
Joe Haller (Mr. Frosty)