Patch junior Mercedes Romih, who has averaged 280 out of 300 points this season, leads the two-time defending champ Panthers into Saturday's DODDS-Europe marksmanship tournament. (Mark Patton/Stars and Stripes)
On paper, the Patch Panthers are prohibitive favorites when Europe’s best marksmen gather at the Baumholder High School gym Saturday morning for the 2011 DODDS-Europe marksmanship championships.
The Panthers are two-time defending European champions and haven’t lost a conference meet in five years. And they’re fully zeroed-in going into the finals. Patch’s top five fired a school-system record 1,415 of a possible 1,500 points on their home range last Saturday, one week after they surpassed 1,400 points for the first time this season. That one was a 1,408, also scored on their home turf. No other team among the six competing here Saturday has come closer to 1,400 this season than the 1,388 Hohenfels rang up Jan. 15 at Bamberg.
More than that, Patch coach Jack Wayne said by telephone Wednesday, five of his top six scorers go to their firing points Saturday tournament-toughened by last year’s experience in stateside national tournaments. In addition to that, three of his record-setting five, Allie Carlson, Josh Sloan and Mercedes Romih, who fired a 289 last week, shot in this event last year.
“We’re on a roll, but myself and the team are taking nothing for granted,” Wayne said. “In shooting, one day you’re up and one day you’re down.”
Wayne sees Hohenfels and fast-rising Vilseck, second overall last year to Patch by just 14 points, as his team’s major challengers. He said his team’s consecutive 1,400s might provide a bit of an intimidation factor, but Hohenfels coach Bruce Andrews downplayed that idea Wednesday.
“We concentrate on our own stuff,” Andrews said in a phone call. “We’re not dwelling on Patch. We’re just going to do what we can.”
Wayne has made every effort to get his team ready for what it will encounter Saturday.
“We’ll be using (firing) tables at Baumholder,” he said of the platforms from which the prone and kneeling events will be contested. The tables mean that instead of firing their precision air rifles at targets on three levels, the competitors will be shooting along just one sightline. “I rebuilt my whole range. We’ve been using tables all year.”
Wayne also is lending the tournament director, David Schwab, Patch’s electronic scoring system, ensuring there’ll be no hanging chads at the Europeans.
“The process requires the targets be scanned and then scored by a computer,” he explained in a recent e-mail. “Manual scoring is OK, but this system is accurate and much faster.”
When the computer’s through, no one’s likely to supplant the Panthers as team champions, as long as they have what for them, according to Wayne’s figures, is an average day.
Led by Romih’s average 280-of-300 score, Addison Flynn’s 278 and Carlson’s 277, Wayne said, his team’s top five averages added together total 1,386, just off last year’s winning total of 1,390.
“1,386 should win the championships,” he predicted.
