SPRING MILLS — The Penns Valley BB Gun Shooting Team hosted 15 teams from five different clubs during the state championship shooting match at Centre Hall Elementary School April 2. Competing clubs send multiple teams, grouped by age, with each team consisting of five members plus two alternates. The Penns Valley A team took first place at the event, with the Palmyra team garnering second place and the Harrisburg Hunters and Anglers team taking third.
The Penns Valley Shooting Team was founded in 1988, organized by Spring Mills resident John Wert. Five years later, in 1993, the team won its first state championship. It now has won the Pennsylvania State BB Gun Championship 11 times, including six of the last 10 years. Wert still serves as head coach of the team, assisted by Lynn McCool.
The participants in this program are 8- to 15-year-old boys and girls. In October of each year, beginning shooters enroll in a 10-week program where they learn to perfect their shooting skills and acquire necessary safety knowledge to be responsible gun handlers. Part of the state competition is a 50-question written test on gun handling and safety.
Unlike typical sporting competitions, spectators were not clapping and cheering for their favorite teams at this event. Target shooting requires intense concentration by the shooters, so the audience remained silent, and only a few muffled conversations were heard on the floor, along with the staccato “pops” of the air rifles as they were fired.
The rifle that all the shooters use in competition are muzzle-loading single-shot Daisy 499B models. The Daisy Company claims this gun to be ‘the most accurate BB gun in the world.”
The shooting range places the shooters at a distance of five meters (just over 16 feet) from the targets. The paper targets have 12 bull’s-eyes, and are placed on boxes filled with heavy cloth to stop the BBs. Tarps line the wall behind the targets to stop ricochets from any stray shots. Two of the targets are used for “sighting in” the guns by firing test shots and then tweaking the gun sights for perfect alignment. All shooters and assistants on the firing line must wear protective safety glasses.
Contestants shoot from four positions: prone, sitting, kneeling and standing in 10-minute heats. The targets are placed at distances between 6 inches and 5 feet above the floor, depending on which shooting position is being used. Scoring is based on the contestants’ shots hitting as close to the bull’s-eyes as possible.
A recent innovation is the use of computerized scoring, in which the targets are scanned by a computer which “sees” the holes made by the BBs and awards points to the shooters. This reduces the tedious work formerly done by team coaches, and eliminates any human error or bias in scoring.
In the school lobby, a raffle was in progress as a fundraiser for the Penns Valley team. Tickets were being sold for a host of items donated by local businesses and individuals.
An awards ceremony followed the competition. The top three Pennsylvania teams are eligible to compete at the national level at the 51st annual Daisy National BB Gun Championship Match to be held in Rogers, Ark., in July.
