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The UTEP women’s rifle team hosted 10.9 Day at the UTEP rifle range, on Monday Oct. 10, to make the UTEP and El Paso community more aware of the collegiate rifle sport. The shooters became the coaches in this annual event to assist participants on how to gain good technique and knowledge to becoming a good target shooter.
The newly ranked No. 16 NCAA rifle team came together to inform and teach the relevance of rifle shooting with enthusiasm and humbleness to put the awareness with hopes in gaining more support from the El Paso community.
During last year’s event, participants were sitting, making it easier to get perfect target. This year, the participants were standing, which made it a little more difficult to hit the target to get the almost perfect score. Contestants were given three tries with the first shot being a test shot, the second and third are ranked for judging.
When shooting in a rifle competition, a 10.9 is the best score a shooter makes in the Air Rifle portion of the shooting competition. The event is where fellow UTEP students, faculty and staff as well as people of the El Paso community can come out and experience first hand how the women of the UTEP rifle team operate an actual Air Rifle.
The athletes use their own personal competition weapons to assist the participants, while the participants may ask various questions to gain better knowledge and see how much concentration a shooter has to have to get a decent target score. In the Olympics games, the decimal points count towards the final score, but in the collegiate level decimal points are irrelevant.
“10.9 is not only what we want our athletes to get in a match up, but also in life,” said head coach Hannah Muegge. “We want our participants to know that this event is a celebration of all kinds of 10.9 accomplishments in their life.”
Many spectators feel that shooting a gun is not hard, or there are no particular procedures to operating a gun. But with this event spectators have the realization that shooting a target is more difficult than expected, or being able to get the perfect score entails more work than anticipated. This event allows many to gain a respect for the sport of rifle shooting.
“It means a lot spread the word about our sport,” freshmen Abby Monique said. “Our sport is more about precision and not just a video game where you can just shoot.”
Many athletes and coaches from other organizations come to support the passion that the rifle team has about shooting—some participate every year to show support or to get the shout out for the best shooter of the day on the UTEP rifle Facebook page. For those that have not shot a gun before, it gives an actual feel of how difficult or easy it may be behind the trigger.
When gaining knowledge of a particular sport or event one must be willing to be open to learn about the particular event. 10.9 is an event where people may gain common knowledge of a non popular sport as well as teach a person that consistency and coordination are what make rifle shooting a special sport.
“It’s exciting to get out the awareness with 10.9 Day,” Haylee Schoenrock said. “It’s cool to see how excited they are to take an interest in our passion.”
The 10.9-Day is about sharing the love within the different organizations of the UTEP School as well as encourages and informs others about a unique sport that takes more than the common knowledge of knowing the basic operations. Handling a gun is not always about killing, but about gaining the knowledge to know how to operate machinery that may assist in certain life situations.
“Being a freshmen on the team, with this being my first 10.9-Day, it means a lot to me to see the support of the UTEP and El Paso community,” Mara Rouse said.
