The girls' 4-H shooting sports club has started their postal league season and L. was quite pleased with her performance last night.

I knew nothing about shooting sports before the girls joined this 4-H club so I did a little research about the sport in general recently.

Every time I mentioned 'postal' used in tandem with 'shooting' my non-shooting friends gave me a weird look, which made me curious where the name came from. Here's the NRA's explanation of the Postal League the girls are participating in right now.

NRA's Competitive Shooting Division sanctions about 10,000 shooting matches a year. Among these is a type of match called a postal. A postal match is one in which competitors fire on their home ranges using targets marked for identification. Targets are mailed to NRA for scoring and compilation of results.

Postals allow shooters to compete on a national basis without ever leaving their home range.

The course of fire is NRA Indoor Three-Position Smallbore Rifle (three 10-shot strings of fire, one each from the prone, kneeling and standing positions, at a distance of 50 feet).

The girls are on an all-girl, prone team that will send in the top score targets - through the mail - to the national headquarters for rank and standing through the season.

L. is thinking target shooting is a whole lot of fun and makes it through each of her three rounds fairly quickly. G. takes her time loading and setting up her shot each and every time with a little less success on hitting her targets. But she's enjoying herself - and making her daddy happy - and the rest of the team seems to be OK with waiting the extra time for G. to finish her round.

The video Fino took last night (have I mentioned lately how thrilled Fino is to be on the range with the girls every week?) sort of demonstrates the action (or lack thereof) on the range.

On YouTube: On the range