Olympic shooting star and five-time medalist Kim Rhode can be heard this Saturday morning on ESPN radio at 790 AM on the “Outdoors with Larry Rea” show. As SSSF’s Honorary Fundraising Chairperson, Kim, an SCTP alumna, will be appearing on the show on behalf of SSSF to discuss our programs and how to support them.
The show broadcasts from Memphis, Tennessee from 6:00 to 7:30 a.m.
Larry and Brenda Potterfield recently donated over $1.7 million to the Scholastic Shooting Sports Foundation to further our role in growing youth shooting through the Scholastic Clay Target Program and the Scholastic Pistol Program.
“Brenda and I are delighted to support an organization that utilizes scholastic shooting programs to help develop today’s youth,” said Larry Potterfield, Founder and CEO of MidwayUSA. “As leaders, we all have an opportunity to change the future; we’re investing in tomorrow’s leaders, America’s future decision makers.”
Larry and Brenda were recently named Founding Life Diamond Members of the Champion’s Roundtable, which recognizes donors who have made major contributions to the SSSF mission. They are also Charter Members of the SSSF Legacy Society, which honors donors who have included SSSF in their estate plans through deferred gifts.
“The generous support provided to the SSSF by Larry and Brenda is vital to the growth and expansion of our Scholastic Clay Target and Scholastic Pistol Programs. This donation will help us extend our reach to get more kids pulling triggers and also support local SCTP and SPP team endowment accounts to fund teams well into the future,” said Ben Berka, President and Executive Director of the SSSF.
About MidwayUSA
Both country kids from Missouri, Larry and Brenda Potterfield turned their passion for shooting sports into a career by opening a small gun shop in 1977 that would eventually become MidwayUSA. They instilled family values like honesty, integrity, and respect for others into the business, and strive to maintain this culture with each employee added to their growing team. For over 37 years, MidwayUSA has offered JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING® for shooting, reloading, gunsmithing, and hunting with an unyielding focus on customer satisfaction.
For more information on MidwayUSA, visit their website, www.midwayusa.com, find them on Facebook, www.facebook.com/OfficialMidwayUSA, or follow them on Twitter, twitter.com/midwayusa.
The Scholastic Clay Target Program will be hosting a College Regional “Spooktacular” Tournament on October 31 – November 2 at the World Shooting and Recreational Complex in Sparta, Illinois. The tournament is open to any and all colleges registered with SCTP. Plans are still coming together, but for now, save the date. You don’t want to miss this! Details will follow soon.
Scholastic Pistol Program teams: Do you want to be included in this fun event? If so, contact Tammy Mowry or Scott Moore to let us know.
It’s moving day!
Effective immediately, Scholastic Shooting Sports Foundation is relocating home-office administration and financial operations from the current Maumee, Ohio office to the National Shooting Complex in San Antonio, Texas.
Plans for the move were originally announced in March, with a long time-frame for the move to allow for new staff to be hired and trained and to ensure there was no interruption of services to our program participants.
“As the Headquarters of the National Skeet Shooting Association and National Sporting Clays Association, the National Shooting Complex is a natural choice to house the SSSF’s operations,” said Louise Terry, Chairperson of the SSSF Board of Directors. “Since we are the largest feeder program for youth shooters to NSSA-NSCA, we envision this as a win-win relationship.”
Ben Berka, SSSF President and Executive Director, added, “We are pleased to call the National Shooting Complex home for our headquarters operations. Housing our key administrative and financial operations alongside an established and mature shooting sports organization such as the NSSA-NSCA will help us grow and give our home office perpetuity into the future.”
For most of your contacts with SCTP and SPP, nothing has changed. For program-specific requests, continue to contact the program staff as in the past. Contact for all of those staff members remains unchanged. Only for those reasons you might have contacted the Maumee, Ohio home office in the past will you now need to contact us in San Antonio.
You can find contact information for our home office and each program on every page of our website. Just scroll down the page, and you’ll find those contacts on the lower right side.
Our new home office contact information is:
The Scholastic Shooting Sports Foundation has contracted with the World Shooting and Recreational Complex (WSRC) to hold its National Team Championships at the Sparta, Illinois facility through 2017. Ben Berka, SSSF President and Executive Director, and Art Ashbrook, WSRC Executive Director, signed the agreement recently to formalize the three-year extension of the foundation’s relationship with the complex.
“We are pleased to call Sparta ‘Home of the SSSF National Championships’ and look forward to meeting our SSSF extended family there each year during the second full week of July,” said Berka. “The Illinois Department of Natural Resources staff at the World Shooting and Recreational Complex are great to work with and are committed to working together with the SSSF to accommodate our growth, both in numbers of participants and in the diversity of events we are offering.”
WSRA’s Ashbrook echoed those sentiments. “The World Shooting and Recreational Complex and the IDNR are extremely pleased by the commitment of the SSSF to hold its National Championships here for the next three years, and hopefully for the next 100,” said Ashbrook. “We think we work very well together, serving the community and young shooters alike.”
More than 10,000 people came to Sparta for the 2014 SCTP National Team Championship and SPP Junior/Senior National Championship at the WSRC in July, including approximately 2500 shooters plus coaches, family members, and other supporters.
Scholastic Shooting Sports Foundation (SSSF) is pleased to announce that Olympic Gold Medalist Kim Rhode will serve as its Honorary Fundraising Chairperson for 2014-2015. Kim is an alumna of the Scholastic Clay Target Program (SCTP), having been involved in the earliest days of SCTP.
“SCTP was very important to me as I began my competitive shooting career, and I am very pleased to lend my support to promote its ongoing growth,” said Rhode.
“Kim represents the best attributes of our program and is a tremendous role model for our youth, not only as an Olympic athlete, but also now as a hard-working mom,” said Louise Terry, Chairperson of the SSSF Board of Directors. “Her extraordinary success in her career is due to her dedication to our sport and to her persistent pursuit of her personal goals. We are very proud of Kim and her outstanding achievements.”
Kim Rhode starting shooting skeet at age 10 and won her first World Championship in American skeet only three years later. She won her first Olympic gold medal in women’s double trap at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, making the 17-year-old the youngest female gold medalist in the history of Olympic shooting. Kim followed this performance with a bronze at the Sydney Games in 2000 and another gold medal in double trap in 2004 at the Athens Games.
When women’s double trap was eliminated from the Olympics following the 2004 Games, Kim refocused on international skeet, winning the silver medal in 2008 in Beijing and her third Olympic gold medal at the 2012 London Games, equaling the world record of 99/100 targets and making her the most decorated Olympic female shooter in history. In addition to her five Olympic medals, Kim has won 13 world championships, plus two ISSF World Cup wins in 2014 as she prepares for her sixth Olympic appearance in Rio in 2016.
“Kim is also a Charter Member of the SSSF Champion’s Roundtable for major supporters,” said Dan Hathaway, Director of Foundation Development. ”Her leadership is most welcome as we embark on our new fundraising efforts.”
More than 2500 young shooters, along with thousands of coaches, family members, and supporters, descended upon the World Shooting and Recreational Complex in Sparta, Ill. last week for the largest youth shooting event ever held, the SCTP and SPP National Championships.
The July 14-19 event saw significant increases in virtually every metric over 2013’s record-setting Nationals. In the SCTP event alone, competitors shot 715,000 targets, a 35% increase over last year. Shooters from 175 SCTP teams came from 26 states.
SPP also saw its own increases. In only its second Junior/Senior National Championship, SPP experienced an increase of 62% in participant numbers, hosting 326 shooters representing 39 teams from 15 states. Earlier this year, SPP hosted a separate Collegiate National Championship with close to 100 shooters from 24 squads.
With the largest contingency of shooters, Trap had almost 1900 participants, a 19% increase. A total of 736 shooters shot Skeet for a 29% growth, and the 677 Sporting Clays shooters represented a 30% increase.
Of the 2180 SCTP shooters, 1818 were male and 361 female.
“An event of this magnitude could only take place so successfully with a great deal of hard work and dedication from our student athletes, coaches, parents, team volunteers, and our own staff,” said Ben Berka, President and Executive Director of the Scholastic Shooting Sports Foundation (SSSF), which powers SCTP and SPP. “We are especially grateful to our many sponsors and benefactors who make it possible for us to create an unforgettable experience for our athletes. We also owe kudos to the World Shooting and Recreational Complex, a remarkable venue that hosted our thousands of shooters and spectators with ease. We look forward to hosting our 2015 National Championships there.”
Those of you at the National Championships last week saw our photographers shooting photos on the ranges, at awards ceremonies, and pretty much wherever something was happening. Many of you asked how you could have access to those photos.
We are still working our way through the volume of photos but will soon have them posted online where you can view them. You will be welcome to download any of those photos and may print or share them in social media. (This will not include the photos you may have arranged to have Elite Images shoot for you.)
Photos posted online will be compressed into smaller sizes, but some of the photos will be available in a larger size. Once all the photos are sorted and posted, we will give you information in this space about how you may view them and request high-resolution digital versions. We will not offer printed photos.
In the meantime, you can view the photos posted thus far on our Facebook pages. Keep checking back, as we will be posting hundreds more over the next several days. Any you see there may be downloaded for your personal use. By the way, you do not have to have a Facebook account to view our pages.
You left Sparta without buying an official event t-shirt, or you liked them so much you want one in another color — or even if you missed the event but don’t want to miss the t-shirt — no worries! The Great Outdoors Company at the WSRC still has a limited supply of shirts available.
The black shirt has the full, colorful design on the back, with the World Shooting and Recreational Complex logo on the front left chest.
Black t-shirts are available in Small, Medium, Large, XL, 2XL, and 3XL.
The other t-shirt style has the entire event design on the front and is offered in four colors in the sizes indicated:
Heather Blue – Small, LargePrice for the t-shirts is $15.99 each with free shipping in the contiguous 48 states.
For credit card orders, call The Great Outdoors Company at 888-529-5130.
Congratulations to Dan Rex of Audubon, Penn., drawn as winner of the Krieghoff Vintage Scroll K-80 shotgun worth more than $20,000. The drawing was held last Saturday night during the National Championships.
Raffle tickets for the gun drawing were sold for $50 each to raise money for the SSSF Scholarship Fund. SCTP and SPP teams also had the opportunity to sell the tickets to earn endowment funds.
Our congratulations to Mr. Rex!
