Our shooters worked really hard all season, both at the pistol and at the rifle. Their persistence paid off. We are coming back from the 2016 USA Nationals with the best team performances of any category in 9mm centerfire pistol, rifle iron and rifle optics (3 team golds, and two bronze for our #2 team!), and with four individual gold and two bronze medals!

US Records

Our #1 rifle optics team and our #1 rifle iron team both set SASP US records!

• Our rifle optics team scored 152.88 seconds, improving its own US record established last month at SASP WI State Championship by almost 3 seconds.
• Our rifle iron team scored 161.29 seconds, setting the US record for this discipline in any category.
• Teagan Richman set the women’s US record for rifle optics at 38.66 seconds.
• Teagan Richman set the women’s US record for rifle iron at 42.29 seconds.

As a reminder, our #1 pistol team established a new 9mm centerfire US record of 164.31 seconds last month at WI Nationals. So we now own all three team records.

Team results

Based on our times, we would have won our team (and individual) gold medals in any division we would have entered.

• Our #1 team (Cameron Thouati de Tazoult, Andy Lamm, Dylan Richman, Teagan Richman)  won the team gold in centerfire pistol senior varsity, rifle iron varsity and rifle optics varsity!
• Our #2 team (Alex Matson, Kyle Morrison, Tommy Ostermann, Patrick McGuire) won the team bronze in centerfire pistol senior varsity and rifle optics varsity, and the #4 spot in rifle iron varsity!

Individual results

• Teagan Richman won three (!!!) individual golds in 9mm centerfire pistol for senior varsity women, rifle optics for varsity women, and rifle iron for varsity women, with the best performances in any women’s categories (i.e. she would have won any category)!
• Cameron Thouati de Tazoult won the individual gold at 9mm centerfire pistol for senior varsity men with the best performance in any men’s category (i.e. he would have won any category), the individual bronze at rifle optics for senior varsity men (with the 3rd best performance of any category), and put up the 8th overall best performance at rifle iron!
• Andy Lamm won the individual bronze at rifle iron for senior varsity men with the 3rd best performance in any men’s category, and posted the 4th overall best performance at 9mm centerfire pistol, and the 5th best at rifle optics.
• Dylan Richman won the individual bronze at 9mm centerfire pistol for senior varsity men with the 3rd best performance in any men’s category, and put up the 4th overall best performance of the championship in at rifle optics and the 6th best at rifle iron.
• Alex Matson had the 8th overall best performance at rifle optics, the 9th best at 9mm centerfire, and the 11th best at rifle iron.
• Kyle Morrison had the 10th overall best performance at rifle optics, the 12th best at rifle iron, and the 27th best at 9mm centerfire.
• Tommy Ostermann had the 11th overall best overall at rifle optics, the 16th best at rifle iron, and the 29th best at 9mm centerfire.
• Patrick McGuire, in his first year in the team, had the 20th overall best performance at rifle optics, the 23rd best at rifle iron, and the 25th best at 9mm centerfire!

Extraordinary performance for our shooters: congratulations to them all, and to head coach Dave Richman, who has the most remarkable track record of any coach in SASP.

Yesterday, at the 2016 SASP Nationals in Marengo, IL, one of our rifles had a significant trigger problem. We spent the evening and part of the night working on it. But this morning the problem was back, and created severe problems for our shooters.

We were worried that they would not be able to finish the match. This would have been so disappointing to the kids who trained hard the whole season. But, in a nick of time, Justin “Buffy” Brannan, the Carroll County Shooting Sports coach, stepped up and offered to lend us a competition trigger group.

Thanks to him, our shooters shooting today were able to complete the rifle tournament and put in a strong performance. We would like to thank him for his selfless offer: this is true sportsmanship.

This year we hosted the SASP WI State Championships at Oconomowoc Sportman’s Club (OSC). The team spent a long time over the last two days prior to the tournament helping set up the grounds. Yet they retained enough spunk to obtain some outstanding results at the championships: three national US records, three team golds, four individual golds, and numerous other top-three results.

The records:

• our squad #1 team set a team record for 9mm centerfire pistol (any category) with a team time of 164.31 seconds, beating their own previous record established in April at Midwest Regionals
• our squad #1 set a team record for rifle optics (any category) with a team time of 155.42 seconds
• Andy Lamm set the individual US record at 9mm centerfire pistol (any category) with an incredible 31.81 seconds – hard to believe!

The placement:

• Our squad #1 (Andy Lamm, Dylan Richman, Cameron Thouati de Tazoult, Teagan Richman) won gold at 9mm centerfire pistol (senior varsity) and rifle optics (varsity)
• Our squad #2 (Alex Matson, Tommy Ostermann, Kyle Morrison, Patrick McGuire) won bronze at 9mm centerfire pistol (senior varsity) and gold at rifle irons (varsity)
• Andy Lamm won individual gold at 9mm centerfire pistol (senior varsity men) and rifle optics (varsity men)
• Teagan Richman won individual gold at 9mm centerfire pistol (senior varsity women) and rifle optics (varsity women)
• Alex Matson won individual gold at rifle irons (varsity men)
• Dylan Richman won individual silver at both 9mm centerfire pistol (senior varsity men) and rifle optics (varsity men)
• Cameron Thouati de Tazoult won individual bronze at both 9mm centerfire pistol (senior varsity men) and rifle optics (varsity men)

US Nationals are next month in Marengo, IL, between July 9 and July 16. We are hoping to improve our times further between now and then, and to do well at Marengo.

We can’t thank OSC enough for helping and supporting the team as they do, and for allowing us to host the championship at their location. Hosting the championship was a lot of hard work.  All the team coaches, members and parents put a lot of work in. A few people were particularly instrumental in making it possible:

• Dave Richman spent several days bulldozing the pistol bays to improve their fit to the stages, and specified all the courses. He also designed the stage stands.
• Mr. Morrison welded all the stands that we used for the championship.
• Steve McGuire led a lot of the setup work for the pistol bays.

Three of our shooters made it to the SSSF All Scholastic Team for action shooting – that is, the All American Team for the sport of Scholastic Action Shooting.

Congratulations to Teagan Richman, Dylan Teagan and Cameron Thouati de Tazoult, who were elected to the SSSF All Scholastic Team!

Original SSSF Press Release

SSSF, the Scholastic Shooting Sports Foundation, is the parent organization for both the Scholastic Action Shooting Program (SASP) and the Scholastic Clay Target Program (SCTP). Our shooters compete in SASP, in three of its four disciplines: centerfire pistol (9mm pistol), rifle iron (22LR rifle with iron sights) and rifle optics (22LR rifle with optical sights).

We just came back from Rolla, MO where we were for Midwest Regionals. The full results are not posted yet, but it appears we won both 9mm centerfire pistol and rifle team titles (optics division), and set two US records. We also have the individual male title (Andy Lamm) and female title (Teagan Richman).

Both Andy and Teagan seem to also have set individual US Records. Teagan scored 43.22 seconds at 9mm centerfire, a new SASP women’s record, and Andy scored 36.22 seconds at 9mm centerfire, finally erasing the previous record set by a West Point shooter in 2014!

The team fielded Cameron Thouati de Tazoult, Dylan Richman, Teagan Richman and Andy Lamm. Alex Madsen was also shooting, and had a great meet.

More details (and pics) soon.

We would never have been able to do this without all the support we get from our amazing gunsmith, Richard Dettelhouser of Canyon Creek Gunsmithing, and from Acme Bullets and Jagermann Brass, thanks to whom our shooters can shoot the amount of ammunition they shoot. Many thanks also to Ewald, who lent us the van we used to bring the team to Midwest Regionals!

We just got the final results from the 2015 SPP championships, and they are hard to believe. Our shooters have pulled an incredible performance!

All of our shooters shot centerfire. We presented a junior team and a senior team (most of whose members were true juniors), plus one alternate shooter (Patrick).

• Our junior team (Andy Lamm, Dylan Richman, Cameron Thouati de Tazoult, Teagan Richman) won the team gold and shattered the national record by 28 seconds, scoring an amazing 188 seconds!
• Andy Lamm won the junior male gold
• Teagan Richman won the junior female gold
• Dylan Richman won the junior male silver
• Cameron Thouati de Tazoult won the junior male bronze
• Patrick McGuire was 8th junior male  shooter
• Our senior team (Tom Ostermann, Alex Matson, Kyle Morrison, Gunnar Morgan) won the team silver
• Tom Ostermann was 4th senior male shooter

In addition, SPP was running a rimfire rifle competition (with two courses), that most of our shooters competed in. We had 4 shooters in the top 10 (Andy Lamm, Cameron Thouati de Tazoult, Dylan Richman and Tom Ostermann), and Andy Lamm won a bronze (and a rifle :-).

How good are our shooters? The junior team record was established by four juniors in exactly 188.59  seconds. The best team time this year by any team at any level was established by the best West Point team (West Point #1)) at Collegiate Nationals, and was 188.04 seconds. So the best West Point shooters beat our high school juniors by a combined 0.55 second over 400 steel targets! Dave Richman, our head coach, would love to see our kids shoot against West Point and thinks they have a fair chance to win.

We have never been so successful at Nationals: kudos to our shooters who worked very hard on their form and times the weeks before Nationals, and have accomplished a truly amazing record this year!

This past weekend proved to be one of the most momentous times for the Lake Country Action Shooters (LCAS) team, one of the many teams participating in the National Scholastic Pistol Program (SPP) in the nation.   The SPP is part of the Scholastic Shooting Sports Foundation (SSSF).

Lake Country Action Shooters are one of the smallest teams in the SPP program.  The SPP gathers numerous teams throughout the country.  “With our extremely small budget, coaches and shooters need to be creative and resourceful”, explains Chris Lamm, one of the team assistant coaches. “We are all volunteers and have limited ways of raising money for the team.  The coaches plan every detail carefully, and we design and manufacture most of our own practice equipment. We are extremely organized in how we run practices because we don’t have many luxuries. We just find a way to do it.” The team focuses on introducing new students to the sport of competition shooting.  The majority of the team only has about 2 years of shooting experience, which makes its success even more impressive.

LCAS have achieved impressive results in its three-year history with the SPP at the National level.  This year the nine members of the LCAS team received awards in the Junior Centerfire (team gold), the Senior Centerfire (team silver), the individual junior male centerfire gold, silver and bronze, and the individual junior female centerfire gold!  The team’s achievements also include a new Junior National record of 188.59 seconds, shattering the previous record of 210 seconds established in 2014.

This year, SPP also implemented a new rimfire rifle competition.  At the end of the new courses, the Lake Country Action Shooters found 4 of its members in the top 10 shooters, including third place finishes in both the student and coach’s categories.  A rifle was won by the student and the coach brought home some endowment money to help pay for future costs of running the team.

Many of the SPP teams practice year around.  This is not the case for the LCAS.  The team struggles to find local range time.  Head Coach Dave Richman, a competitive shooter himself, explains: “There are very few shooting ranges in our county with facilities that enable action shooting as practiced by SPP.”

So how does the team practice for the SPP championship? Again, Dave Richman explains: “We focus our practices on specific skills, not the courses of fire. We compete in multiple competitions that have a similar style of stages, such as steel matches. We put heavy emphasis on dry firing at home.”

Dan Matson,  assistant coach for Lake Country Action Shooters, adds: “With Coach Richman’s years of competition shooting experience, he can observe a shooter and pick up little things that most people wouldn’t see. This allows him to make changes on the fly in how we coach that student. This has been invaluable to our shooters success.”

Michel Thouati, father of the lead off shooter for the junior team says, “ Coach Richman’s philosophy is that shooting fundamentals, such as trigger control and sight picture, are what makes a shooter successful. His intense focus on the fundamentals is relentless. But, beyond this focus our shooters follow truly unique training practices, all introduced by Coach Richman.  No other team follows these training techniques.”

The hard work and dedication by the coaches and athletes has allowed the Lake Country Action Shooters to be very successful, having earned two team gold medals, and two team silver medals in the last three National Championships. This year, however, despite the increased number of competitors and the constantly improving times of the competitors, Lake Country Action Shooters’ success was even more rewarding .  Individually our athletes also won two individual golds, one individual silver and one individual bronze – plus the National Junior Centerfire team record.

The goal of the SCTP and SPP is to promote safe gun handling skills and promote interest in the shooting sports.  Participants are middle school, high school and college students.  Our team motto “Go 5●4●5” is what we try to achieve on each run (five shots for five targets) with the greatest amount of speed coupled with accuracy that an athlete can perform. The SPP pistol stages consist of four individual courses of fire.   Each participant shoots a course five times, with the slowest time thrown out.   The remaining four times are added together for a total time on that stage.  This is repeated for each of the four stages.

Lake Country Action Shooters, based in Hartland, WI, would also like to thank:

• The National SPP director and manager Scott Moore and Tammy Mowry
• State SPP coordinator Rick Leach (head coach for the Ozaukee SPP team)
• Head Coach Ed Ide (of the Wilmot SPP team) with sharing range time. Both of these head coaches also had impressive achievements at this years National Competition.
• Stone Bank Sportsmen’s Club and Board for utilizing their club
• WCTC Brian Dorow and Mike Neuens for classroom training time and facility use.

For more information contact:
Dave Richman
Head Coach, Lake Country Action Shooters
http://Go545.com
dave.a.richman@gmail.com
262.370.90.35

What a great job our young shooters did at the 2015 Wisconsin Scholastic Pistol Program Championship!

All of our shooters shot centerfire (9mm). We fielded two teams of 4 shooters each, a junior team and a senior team (our senior team really counted only one senior and three juniors).

We won the following team titles:

• Gold for our junior team (Andy Lamm, Dylan Richman, Cameron Thouati de Tazoult, Teagan Richman)
• Gold for our senior team (Tom Ostermann, Alex Matson, Kyle Morrison, Gunnar Morgan)

In addition, our shooters also won the following individual titles:

• Gold (Junior male shooter) for Andy Lamm
• Gold (Junior female shooter) for Teagan Richman
• Silver (Junior male shooter) for Dylan Richman
• Bronze (Junior male shooter) for Cameron Thouati de Tazoult

This is an amazing set of trophies for our young shooters, who are, we believe the smallest team at the WI championships, and who have never been able to use an official course to practice so far.

The Nationals are in 5 weeks, and all of our shooters are going. They have an excellent chance to do well, since our junior team shattered last year’s National record time of 235 seconds by an incredible 25 seconds, and our senior team is not too far behind. Let’s wish them a great performance up there!

This year, for the first time, SPP Nationals will be running, in addition to the regular pistol courses for the championship, a rimfire (22LR) rifle competition with two stages as a rifle match.  We expect that the large majority of shooters present at Nationals will shoot the rifle competition as well, and we see it as a good way to gauge our well our own shooters are doing with rifle training. Therefore,  all of our shooters will shoot the rifle competition.

Lake Country Action Shooters, the smallest team in the competition, won today’s SPP (Scholastic Pistol Program) speed shooting 9mm pistol competition and shattered the national record time in the process.

The team also collected the individual gold, silver and bronze medals for male junior centerfire (9mm) shooters and the individual gold medal for female junior centerfire (9mm) shooters. The six best times in the centerfire division (the most challenging, because of the increased recoil) were realized by team members of Lake Country Action Shooters. Congratulations to:

– Andy Lamm, Dylan Richman, Cameron Thouati de Tazoult and Dylan Richman, 2015 Wisconsin junior team centerfire champions;
–  Andy Lamm, 2015 Wisconsin male junior centerfire champion;
– Teagan Richman, 2015 Wisconsin female junior centerfire champion;
– Dylan Richman, Wisconsin male junior centerfire silver medalist;
– Cameron Thouati de Tazoult, Wisconsin male junior centerfire bronze medalist;
– Tom Ostermann, Kyle Morrison, Alex Matson and Gunnar Morgan, 2015 Wisconsin senior team centerfire champions
– Tom Ostermann, Wisconsin male senior centerfire champion (a true junior)
– Alex Matson, Wisconsin male senior centerfire silver medalist (a true junior)
– Kyle Morrison, Wisconsin male senior centerfire bronze medalist

Lake Country Action Shooters, the smallest team in the WI SPP speed shooting championship, counts only nine young middle school and high school shooters, with no corporate or organizational sponsorships. Yet its junior team and its senior team each won won their category at today’s Wisconsin SPP 9mm Pistol Championship. What is more, its junior team won by shattering last year’s National record of 235 seconds, beating it by 25 seconds! Its senior team also won its category, despite counting a majority of juniors in its ranks.

For more information contact:

Dave Richman
Coach, Lake Country Action Shooters
http://Go545.com
dave.a.richman@gmail.com
262.370.90.35

Hard to believe – yet our shooters managed to beat their record from last year at the US SPP championship!

We shot centerfire. We decided to run all of our junior shooters in the junior division, rather than spreading them between junior and senior division. We won the following team titles:

• Gold medal for our #1 junior team
• 4th place for our #2 junior team

We won the following individual titles:

• US female junior champion
• US male junior champion
• #1, #2 US junior female shooters
• #1, #3, #4, #10 US junior male shooters
• #4 US senior female shooter

It is all the more remarkable given that the majority of our shooters are shooting their first season at the pistol, and that none of our shooters have more than two years of pistol shooting. They did an amazing job applying their training practices to the championship, and controlling their emotions and behavior like real champions. They fully deserve their victory.

Looking at the other teams, it is worth noting that our #1 junior team would also have won the senior championship if they had run in the senior centerfire division.

There are two junior rimfire teams with good times, who could have been strong opponents, but against whom we probably would have won, had they competed in centerfire division. However, there are two senior rimfire teams that would have beat us (1) had they shot centerfire and (2) had our junior team competed in the senior division.

What this means is that we need to improve further next year. We’ll celebrate our shooters next week with a pizza party and some team pictures, but we must be aware that we need to work more and better if we want to be competitive next year 🙂 Let’s close the year with another match followed by a couple of wrap-up practices, and look at how well we can do next year!