jabird56
07-31-2012, 07:32 PM
Well, the Mrs. and I got back from a week of volunteering with NRA's Annual International Youth Hunter Education Challenge (YHEC) up in Mansfield PA. I've been a Range Officer on the Sporting Clays Range for around 16 years now, and the wife has be helping out on the Wildlife Identification trail for the last few years.
This year we had 318 participants go through the different venues, and again on Sporting Clays they had a blast. Over the three days of competition they burned up just over 9500 shotgun shells going against a field of 30 clay targets for each competitor.
Over the years that I have been supporting this annual event, I'm still impressed with these kids (ages 9-19) coming in with responsibility of maintaining a safe attitude, and being respectful to all. It's nice hearing the competing youth saying yes sir and no sir, and helping to tear down the events after the competition is completed. It takes 7-10 days to set everything up, but only a day to tear down.
We have had a couple of competitors move on to Olympic class shooting in shotgun events, small bore rifle, and of course archer. So, it's nice to know that we have helped in the training pipeline for these competitors as they achieve their goals.
There is also the camraderie amongst the volunteers (much like the MM clan here), where we come together annually supporting the youth competition plus having fun amongst ourselves.
So it's another year til we will be migrating to the next gathering in Raton, NM.
Enough said.
This year we had 318 participants go through the different venues, and again on Sporting Clays they had a blast. Over the three days of competition they burned up just over 9500 shotgun shells going against a field of 30 clay targets for each competitor.
Over the years that I have been supporting this annual event, I'm still impressed with these kids (ages 9-19) coming in with responsibility of maintaining a safe attitude, and being respectful to all. It's nice hearing the competing youth saying yes sir and no sir, and helping to tear down the events after the competition is completed. It takes 7-10 days to set everything up, but only a day to tear down.
We have had a couple of competitors move on to Olympic class shooting in shotgun events, small bore rifle, and of course archer. So, it's nice to know that we have helped in the training pipeline for these competitors as they achieve their goals.
There is also the camraderie amongst the volunteers (much like the MM clan here), where we come together annually supporting the youth competition plus having fun amongst ourselves.
So it's another year til we will be migrating to the next gathering in Raton, NM.
Enough said.