Submitted By: Danielle Vrielink

Throughout the past few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of helping coach the Junior Olympians, an awesome group of young athletes between 10 and 14 years old. So far, their activities have ranged from mountain biking at COP, speed skating at the oval, running at Glenmore Park, climbing and biathlon. Today, we we’re at the Nordic Center teaching them how to shoot rifles, which was a tonne of fun.  I would like to quickly thank Airat and the Alberta Biathlon Club for letting us use their 0.22 rifles which allowed each kid to have their own gun. After explaining how the rifles work and the safety rules on the range, it was the kids’ turn to show us what they could do! It was amazing to see first time shooters hitting 4/5 and 5/5. Once they figured out the shooting, which didn’t take very long, it was on to games. Karen and I decided that we should probably start with something simple, so we decided on 3 laps around the fence, 2 prone shootings and a penalty of 5 burpies per miss. The race was off and it was great to see all of them sprinting around the fence, but I couldn’t help but wonder how many targets they were all going to hit at such a high heart rate. We were all blown away when they left the range after all hitting 4/5 and 5/5. After that race, everyone was pretty tired, so we decided to play a shooting game called kill Charlie, which is when you have to hit all of your targets except for the middle one and then, if you haven’t missed, you can try to hit the middle target of the person next to you. After one round Colten had eliminated his brother to claim a spot in the finals against Max, who had eliminated Liam. Once the finals were complete, the kids were ready for one final race. We decided to make this last one count, so we settled on a course with obstacles, climbing and running through tunnels. Of course, we had to come up with a creative penalty so if they missed one, they had to do “The Chicken Dance”, if they missed two, they had to do the “Macarena,” if they missed three, they had to do “I’m a Little Teapot.” With their fear of singing and dancing, the boys made sure not to miss more than 1 on all of their shootings, which is quite impressive given the challenging course we set out for them. We finished off the practice with one final game of kill Charlie, and by then, most of the kids were pretty tired as two out of three mistakenly eliminated their self during the game by hitting their own middle target! All in all, it was a great day out in Canmore and after seeing how talented this young group of athletes are, I can’t wait to see them race during the winter!

Pictures Here!!!

Now that we have the program up and running with a core of enthusiastic kids, an activity packed agenda and engaged coaching, we would encourage anyone who is between the ages of 10 and 14, that may be interested in these sports (or their parents just want to get them off the game boy) to try out a practice.  We are meeting Mondays, Wednesdays in Calgary and Saturdays in Canmore.  If you would like more information regarding this program you can contact Luke McGurk at lukemcgurk@hotmail.com