AAR: Sacramento, CA January 15 &16 2011

[nukechaser]

T'was a foggy and at times chilly Appleseed weekend in Sacramento, but a fun, safe and productive one nonetheless.

We had 13 shooters on Saturday and 14 on Sunday with a nice mix of new Appleseed friends and returnees.

We had a nice range of age groups. Our youngest, Mitchell, was (I think) 8 and our seasoned shooters were just about old enough to order off the back of restaurant's menus.    Our firing line had a mix of centerfire and rimfire rifles, including a couple of persistent individuals with bolt-actions (including little Mitchell with his junior-sized CZ)

America gained six new Riflemen this weekend; three on Saturday and three on Sunday! Two of the Sunday Riflemen backed it up with another 210+ score later in the day and Missy figured a second Rifleman score would be the icing on the cake. It was so very nice to see her frustrations of months gone by resolve into consistent marksmanship and self-confidence. She cleared the Sunday afternoon Red Coat.

First-time Appleseeders, Paul and Matt and veteran Missy were our Saturday Riflemen.
Zivanka, John and Scott rounded out our weekend with Sunday Rifleman scores.

Zivanka also has a habit of clearing Red Coats... three out of four during this shoot!

Mitchell, Nicholas, Joey and Josh all were awarded Luther Blanchard patches for working hard at always improving their safety skills and being engaged in all that was going on. Our own Heavy-Tank presented the patches to his peers.

It was nice to see Annie-O join us again and Jeff brought a couple of his buddies out to properly celebrate his birthday weekend by "Seventh Stepping" as an IIT and introducing them to Appleseed. Something tells me they had private tutoring prior to arriving at the shoot, as they seemed to have the steady hold factors and the six steps of making the shot already down-pat.

Natural ability was evident as all shooters showed a rapid grasp of the instruction presented, which also is a testament to the dedication of the fantastic instructor crew.  Our pace was helped along with shot-groups growing smaller and on-target.  We managed eleven AQTs over the course of the weekend.

History was well presented with the solemn vigor shown by our predecessors and was well received by the attendees.  Pinbreaker did a great job of interjecting relevant quotes throughout the weekend during prep periods and at the end of each day.

The AQT time-limits were the biggest hurdle, as folks were really establishing, verifying and trusting their Natural Point of Aim.  As a result, we had good scores and tight shot groups, but incomplete courses of fire before time expired.  We slipped two team-shoot, cadence-fire drills into the AQTs of Sunday to emphasize rifleman's cadence and what a difference it made. Scores climbed and the resultant Rifleman scores showed how well our shooters took it to heart.

All the instructors of "Team Sacramento" did a fantastic job and I am so very proud of them. You're all an inspiration! My thanks to everyone for pitching in and making this a smooth shoot.

I look forward to our next event and hope to see all of our shooters join us again, and bring some of their friends with them.

Intructors:
-nukechaser (SB/RH)
-Hambone (IIT3)
-Dani-O (IIT3)
-Heavy Tank (IIT3)
-PinBreaker (IIT2)
-Ginger (IIT2)
-jmirel2 (IIT)

[PinBreaker]

The new Rifleman!

[PinBreaker]

Luther Blanchard Patches

[PinBreaker]

Some other photos:

[PinBreaker]

I had a great time this last weekend and hope to see some more shooters out in March.  I still think we could get 100 shooters out in April and will work towards that end.  Thanks again to NC for pulling off a great weekend!

[SactoKaos]

Hey all! This is Mattee from the Appleseed! Just wanted to say I had a blast! (no pun intended). Very excited I hit my Rifleman score and even more excited that I followed it up the next day with an extra 10 points! You can count on seeing me more at the Appleseeds!