SPARC 22LR Series Round One, The TLRS P10 Practical 22.

The first round of the SPARC 22lr field shooting series got underway in the rolling hills of PioPio in southern Waikato with clear skies and not a breath of wind (much to the match directors disgust) to make for an absolutely stunning day of competitive shooting. This venue is in a beautiful part of the country not many would get to see otherwise with plenty of wild animals running around and beautiful views of Mt Ruapehu and Tongariro of in the distance. This property has a great combination of rolling and steep hills, along with scrub and native bush that makes for a great area to set a challenging field style course of fire.

Wess took over match director duties for this event and did a great job keeping the match flowing and dealing with any issues through the day. This was his first time directing a major match and he stepped up to the task and kept the match operating a the high standard competitors are used to seeing from GPRE and TLRS events.

The course of fire was spread over eight stages with a mix of natural terrain and man made props to challenge the competitors positional shooting skills along with multiple targets on each stage and some steep angles that needed to be taken into account if you wanted your projectile to connect with your intended target.

We had a full card of 48 shooters booked in for the event, but as always in this current “pandemic” we lost several in the days leading up and ended up having 42 competitors on the day battling it out trying to hit as many targets as they could to get points not just for this event, but towards the overall 2022 SPARC 22LR championship. We had 13 competitors in Hunter Class and 29 in Rifleman Class. Hunter had targets out to 100m and has a restricted set of rules around rifles and equipment allowed. Rifleman on the other hand has no rifle or gear limitations and the targets went all the way out to 200m rather then 100m. If you are new to the sport I would give hunter class a go, even if your rifle breaches the rules you can still enter the class and just not be eligible to win on the day or score series points.

It was good to see a reasonable number of new competitors to this event who came along for there first try at a practical shooting style event. The 22lr events are a great way to get a start into the sport with relatively low cost of entry in comparison to centre fire events, not to mention the noise levels are near non exsisitant with suppressed 22s. It would be great to see more new competitors to the remaining rounds and possibly a few more ladies coming along would be a great addition to the events, I might even make it cheaper for a second ticket if you bring your wife or partner along to compete at the next round

Please see the scores for round one below, this includes the series points on the right hand side of the score sheet.