Individual Championship
The Final of the 2023-24 Individual Championship took place last night at Balerno & Currie’s range. There had been six call-offs from the original sixteen qualifiers and reserves filled those places until the morning of the shoot when another two suddenly called off. Unfortunately no further reserves were available and the competition went ahead with only fourteen competitors. The Final consisted of six from Edinburgh University, five from Watsonians, one each from Balerno & Currie, George Watson’s and Hawick plus the two Byes. The winner was Tom Ralph of Edinburgh University, who beat Hawick’s Alan Anderson in the Final. Congratulations to him.
For the first time in this event’s history the competition was held using electronic targets. The shoot proceeded much more quickly without having to wait for targets to be scored and tied matches to be regauged. As re-gauging is impossible with ETS shooting, the tie-beak rule was changed so that ties were resolved first by countback on the two 10-shot strings, then by the number of 10’s then 9’s etc.
The full results can be seen here, but here’s a summary:
I won’t go into all the details of the first round, but the pick of the ties was undoubtedly multiple winner Alasdair Horne versus George Watson’s Junsung Kim. Alasdair put in a very uncharacteristic performance and Junsung scraped through to round two on the second phase of the tie-break rule by virtue of having shot more 10’s.
Dan Gutteridge (the 2015 champion) and Neil Sinclair (both EU) drew the Byes and the other round 1 winners were Amanda Puchalla (EU) over the 2022 Champion Adam Dove (Watsonians), Tom Ralph over Aleyna Kartal (both EU), Rhona Dove over James Gutteridge (both Watsonians), the 2022 champion Alan Anderson (Hawick) over Eilidh Scheuerl (EU), Robin Thomson over Nick Baker the 2004 and 2008 champion (both Watsonians).
In round 2, there were wins for Dan over Amanda, Tom over Rhona, Alan over Neil and once again, Junsung Kim got through on a tie-break, beating Robin on countback.
The first semi-final saw another tie between Dan and Tom, with the latter going through to the final on countback. In the other, young Junsung rather ran out of steam and Alan won the match quite comfortably.
In the final, after an aborted start when his sling disintegrated, Tom Ralph took the trophy for the first time with scores of 98, 97 versus Alan Anderson’s 97, 96.
The trophy will (hopefully) be presented at the prizegiving in May.
I’d like to thank Balerno & Currie for allowing us to use their range, and also Mark Westwood of the home club for running the computer controlling the electronic targets. The event could not have taken place without him.
I would like to apologise to those present for forgetting to bring a vital component for connecting up the big screen in the clubroom in order to display the results, but an old-school piece of paper seemed to suffice.
WFH