SCARBOROUGH, Maine — Nobody’s ever shot an air rifle more accurately than recent Scarborough High School graduate Brandon Bryer, the state record holder with a 580 score.
That’s out of 600 possible points.
“We’re aiming at a period at the end of a sentence from 33 feet away, and I hit it 40 out of 60 times,” Bryer explained.
The other 20? They were all somewhere on the tiny ring around that period, worth nine points instead of the 10 you get for the bull’s eye.
Bryer, 18, has accepted a scholarship to join the rifle team at Morehead State University in Kentucky, making him the first Mainer he knows of to compete in the sport at the NCAA’s highest level. He’s won the Henry Hall Award as the best off-hand position shooter in Maine high school competition, and the Larry Carter Award as the best air rifle shooter.
Bryer is the reigning state Junior Olympic air rifle champion, and he competed in the National Rifle Association National Championships this month in Indiana as well as USA Shooting’s national competition the previous month in Georgia.
Bryer’s place as the state’s first top-division collegiate shooter may seem odd, considering Maine’s hunting heritage, tradition of gun-ownership and history of hosting top biathlon events. But Bryer said the state largely remains a blindspot to college recruiters.
To get on college coaches’ radar screens, he made it a point to send them his scores and compete in out-of-state events where he knew they’d be watching.
“The shooting community is pretty tight-knit, so it’s hard for people to get their name into that circle,” he said. “Especially up here in Maine — it’s not known as an NCAA recruiting hot spot.”
And just as many NCAA coaches don’t realize what kind of a pool of recreational rifle shooters Maine has, Bryer said many recreational rifle shooters here don’t realize what it’s like to pull the trigger competitively.
Mainers who aren’t hunters are often even more confused about the sport, he said.
Here are a few things most people in Maine still don’t realize about competitive rifle shooting, according to Bryer.
There’s a lot of gear
Think hockey is expensive and heavy on the equipment? Rifle shooting requires a lot of gear as well.
In addition to the rifle itself — during a recent demonstration at the Scarborough Gun Club, Bryer was using a friend’s .22-caliber competition-ready smallbore rifle which he said could sell for as much as $3,000 retail — shooters can pile up thousands of dollars in specialized clothing.
A stiff, canvas jacket and similar pants, with special knee pads, gloves and boots can add up to more than $2,500 in equipment expenses, Bryer said.
Plus, he said, rifle shooters need rounds to fire both in competition and practice. During the height of his preparation for college recruiters, Bryer said he fired as much as 800 to 900 rounds every week.
You have better odds of making a college football team
“Statistically, it’s the hardest NCAA sport to get into,” Bryer said. “There are 3,000 to 4,000 rifle shooters graduating from high school across the country every year, and there are only about 40 NCAA teams, with three or four openings apiece. That means there are 3,000 to 4,000 shooters vying for as little as 120 spots.”
So while 6 percent of senior high school football players in America — about one out of every 16 — will play college ball, in comparison, only one out of every 33 graduating high school rifle shooters will land a spot on a college team.
Even though guns are involved, it’s safer than football, too
“People just hear ‘gun’ and think ‘Oh God, you’re going to kill somebody,’” he said. “But I’ve never felt more safe than at nationals walking down range with 100 guns pointed at me.”
Bryer, who comes from a hunting family and has been handling rifles for years, said competitive rifle shooting is an extremely controlled environment, in which the guns are required to remain unloaded and blocked up by brightly colored Empty Chamber Indicators at all times they’re not being fired in competition.
The sport isn’t plagued by concussion controversies, like professional football, and it’s hard to strain a muscle when your goal is be as still as possible, Bryer said.
According to a study of NCAA data, injuries happen in football games at a rate of 35.9 per 1,000 athlete exposures — an “athlete exposure” is one player in one game, so a football game in which 53 players participate, for instance, represents 53 athlete exposures.
Of the major NCAA team sports studied, women’s softball had the lowest in-game injury rate with 4.3 per 1,000 athlete exposures.
The Civilian Marksmanship Program reports that the injury rate in competitive air rifle shooting is .0017 per 1,000 athlete exposures, or a total of six minor injuries over 15,000 competitions nationwide during a 10-year span.
It’s a physical sport and a mental sport
Just because rifle shooters aren’t regularly being sidelined with hamstring injuries doesn’t mean they don’t have to be in good shape. Bryer said he works out regularly to maintain his fitness and ability to control his body movements at the smallest level.
“If I go out over Thanksgiving and Christmas and gain 10 pounds, that’s going to change my positioning when I shoot,” he said.
In a competition setting, a rifle shooter might find him- or herself standing still holding a 13-pound rifle for the better part of 75 minutes, a feat that’s not as obviously awe-striking as dunking a basketball, but which takes endurance and fortitude.
But as challenging as the physical requirements are, Bryer said the sport is as much a mental one.
Rifle shooters must control their breathing, slow their heart rates and remove all doubt from their minds. Other competitors will try to psyche you out, too, he said.
At the NRA competition in Indiana, three rivals stared him down to try to shake his confidence while he aimed his rifle, Bryer recalled. But the psyche-out backfired when the Mainer shot a series of bull’s eyes, leaving the mind-game players second guessing themselves.
Competitions are decided by the slightest of movements
“In Indiana, we had four days of shooting,” Bryer said. “I tied with three other people. It’s incredible to think that after shooting 500 rounds, four people would shot the exact same scores. With one shot, you could have dropped 10 places.
“It’s a game of millimeters,” he continued. “The difference between a 9.9 and a 10 on the target is an eyelash. You could be 33 or 50 feet away, and cost your team the match or even a championship with just a millimeter of difference in your shot.”
It’s not like hunting or laser tag … but Bryer’s pretty good at those things, too
Bryer’s skill at rifle shooting translates pretty well to hunting or even more whimsical games like laser tag — he said he played the latter game recently during Scarborough’s project graduation.
But he said many people assume that since they’re good at hunting or even video games, they could also be good at competitive rifle shooting.
That’s not necessarily true, he said.
“People will say, ‘Oh, you’re a shooter — I can do that, that’s not that impressive,’” Bryer said. “But when they see what we’re really doing, they’re like, ‘Oh…’”
