It is once again that time of year, when we check our gun boxes to make sure we have enough rounds to shoot and that the lens on our scope is clean. Time to get ready for another National Skirmish!

Last October I never even considered the 8th Virginia when I made my top picks for the 124th National, I hope I don’t make the same mistake this time!

Last Nationals Top 10

I think it’s pretty safe to say that the winners of the next National Skirmish will come from last year’s top 10, although there can always be a surprise, right?

The 124th National Musket Team Champions

The 8th Virginia finished first last October with an impressive time of 423.4 seconds, and third in the spring. Looking back at past National records, it’s hard to ignore the likelihood of repeat winners, so I’d imagine that this team has a good chance to repeat this National skirmish.

The 111th Ohio finished second last fall, just 0.8 seconds behind the 8th Virginia, but they are a host team at this National, so they are out.

The Dismal Swamp Rangers finished third in the fall, and won the spring event. The October results shows a bit longer clay bird board than other top teams, if they can pick up a few seconds this time around they will be in the hunt for another win.

The 122nd National Musket Team Champions

The 17th Virginia Infantry claimed a 4th place finish in October, and also won the National in October of 2010. It looks like the pot event was the troublesome event for them last time around, but if they can pickup a couple seconds, they could also be in the hunt.

The 110th Ohio. Now I expected more from this team, in the last three Nationals they have finished 5th, 4th, and 5th. Could this recent multi-National-Skirmish winning team rise back to the top of the standings in May? I wouldn’t count them out.

The 149th Pennsylvania finished 12th last spring, and 6th last fall, shaving a full minute and 6 seconds off their time. That’s a pretty good improvement, can they improve from 6th to 1st and shave another minute off? That’s a tall order.

The Nansemond Guard finished 4th at the 122nd Nationals in October of 2010, but then slipped to 8th and 7th place finishes last year.

The 9th Virginia Cavalry had a 8th place finish last year, but that followed two consecutive runner up finishes. This is an interesting team to watch out for.

Harlan’s Light Cavalry finished 9th last fall, and had a similar 10th place finish a year prior the that.

The 2nd Maryland Artillery finished 10th at the 124th National, they would need to improve their time by 100 seconds or better to finish at the top of the standings.

And that wraps things up… right?

Wait a minute, what about the Washington Blue Rifles? They were hosts at the last National Skirmish, and they had 6th and 7th place finishes the last two Nationals they shot in. Don’t count them out.

And why aren’t the Union Guards in this list? Oh, look they finished 11th at the last National, how did that happen?

Whatever happens, I’m sure it will be a great National Skirmish, and we will all be surprised by the team taking the Gold Medals home.

Good luck to everyone, and have a safe trip to the range. See you there!

Related posts:

1. My Top 5 Picks to Win at the 124th National
2. My Pick to Win the Musket Match at the 121st National
3. Best Musket Teams in Last 24 Years

You know how when you go over to the tower at 8am before a regional musket match, and you stand there for a bit, invariably some needy team commander comes running over to ask you if you are an extra shooter?

Well, I went to the Central Virginia Regional May 6th, 2012, and that didn’t happen, to me, or to 5 other guys looking for a team to shoot with. We were just standing there unsure about what to do, and then we decided, shoot, lets just shoot on our own team!

And that’s what we did, we signed ourselves up and shot the match as a hospital team.

Did we have fun? We sure did!

Did we break targets? Heck yes!

Before the match…

I had an ugly weekend, had an installation at work on Friday and it wore me down like nothing has in months. I wanted to shoot individuals on Saturday, but I was far too sore to even attempt it. Ended up doing all kinds of other stuff.

Sunday I woke up early, packed the car with my guns, uniform, gear, wife and kids, and boogied on down to the fort.

We arrived and it was overcast, humid, and chilly.

Stopped at the snack bar for a Sausage Egg and Cheese, I only mention it because in my memory, which goes back to the early 80s era snack bar (back when the egg sandwiches still had dippy eggs), this was one of the best sandwiches I’ve had from them in a while, so good on them, keep up the good work.

Of course the scratch team I joined ended up at Position 25, and I parked at Position 3. Oh joy.

Opening Ceremonies

This was short and sweet, and I got some great photos, even got a few from up in the main tower…

The Match

The targets were pretty standard, clays, tiles, and rapid fire paper plates. Nothing to write home about, but fun and good practice for the National.

My shooting was good, 4 for 10 on the clay board, 4 hits in 5 shots on the paper plates, 4 for 4 on the tiles, 3 for 3 on the hanging clays, and 2 for 7 on the 100 yard tiles. Not a bad day at all.

Also my wife, whom I refer to as the pregnant one, stuck it out all match, cheering me on with my two troublesome boys running a-muck. She says she had a fun morning, but I’m not convinced.

And although the weather looked ugly, it never rained during the match. That’s all we asked for!

Thanks for shooting with me…… uh….. you guys!

The Rub

I don’t know if I’m more half glass full on the whole hospital team issue or not. I got to shoot, and have fun, and that’s great! I left the match with a smile.

For the Win!

However, part of me wants to lean on the fact that six N-SSA members paid to shoot at a regional match, but our scores weren’t posted on the scoreboard. It just doesn’t seem fair, to the six of us, to “exile” our score because we all come from different teams.

I’m not saying I’m mad, or unhappy per say, but it just doesn’t feel right, or fair. But rules are rules.

UPDATE: It seems that our team choose not to submit scores, sorry to put the blame in the wrong place!

No related posts.

For those of you who don’t check the N-SSA Message Board on a daily or weekly basis, it’s possible you haven’t yet heard about the Strategic Planning Session held during the January Board of Directors Meeting.

Well, at least, I didn’t hear about it until I read Commander Linwood McMahon’s post in the N-SSA Official Information Forum yesterday.

Below is the link to the document, go ahead and open it up, and take a gander, I’ll wait….

N-SSA Strategic Planning Session – January 2012:

http://www.n-ssa.org/NATIONAL/N-SSA_Planning_Session_Jan_2012.pdf

Are you bored yet, maybe confused? Let me sum it up:

A meeting was held during the BoD meeting to brainstorm a bunch of ideas to discuss, wring-out, and focus our organizations future endeavors.

Now, this document appears to have been written after the BoD meeting and is basically a “white board ideas” of all the committee members assembled from the discussion. It’s actually pretty interesting to read all the different ideas that were thrown at the wall in this document.

Here are the four primary topics discussed at the meeting:

• Strategic Planning, here they discussed every possible way you could describe our organization. This was used to discuss a mission and a list of short and long term goals for the N-SSA.
• Budget & Revenues, here they discussed ways of increasing revenue and decreasing costs to the organization. Surprisingly, no goals seemed to be set in this section.
• Membership Growth and Retention, for this session they weighed the options the organization has to either go out and find, and sign up new members, versus finding ways to guarantee that current members keep coming back every year.
• Growing the Organization, here the session focused on the N-SSA from a more public perspective, how the outside world sees us and how we promote ourselves, with the goal of growing our membership and revenues.

My first comment after reading all of this is Kudos to the BoD for taking a step in a new and positive direction. It’s important to remember that we can’t keep doing the same tired things over and over, it’s time for new ideas!

Don’t Panic!

The next comment I want to make to the membership is, if I’m reading this document correctly, don’t panic if you are reading ideas you don’t like or don’t agree with, you don’t need to load your smoothie with rock salt just yet…

I think the point here is to throw all the ideas together on paper, the good AND the bad, and look at all of them and weigh the pros and cons of each.

Also, reading this document, I don’t get the impression that the BoD has taken any action on these ideas, at least not yet. (Unless I’m even more in the dark than I think!)

And that’s the elephant in the room really, which of these ideas is the BoD interested in? Will the BoD actually implement any of these ideas at any point in the near or far future? It’s hard to tell by this document. I could discuss any number of these topics in blog posts at length, and perhaps if there is interest I will in future posts.

Linwood did allude to three and five year action plans to be developed at future meetings in his forum post. I’m assuming that’s where the best of these ideas will get plugged in and implemented.

Where does that leave us?

Here’s my big question, the BoD appears to be ready to move forward and become a more modern, lean and efficient organization, but is the membership ready for this? Time, and perhaps the future issues of the Skirmish Line will tell us!

Related posts:

1. Let your Regional Commander Know…
2. Let’s Put this Puppy to Bed!
3. Help Wanted: Inquire Within!