The Final of the 2024-25 Individual Championship took place yesterday afterrnoon at Balerno & Currie’s range, once again making use of the club’s electronic targets. A full complement of 16 finalists attended, albeit including six reserves replacing original qualifiers who could not attend.

The winner, perhaps surprisingly for the first time, was Sinclair Bruce of Balerno & Currie, who beat clubmate Alasdair Horne in the final.

The full results can be seen here, but here’s a summary:

I won’t go into all the details of the first round, but the pick of the ties was undoubtedly Sinclair Bruce’s match against Nick Baker (Watsonians). Nick dropped his 20th and last shot to lose the match on the countback tie rule after both had recorded fine 198s.  Other notable scores in this round were 198s from Adam Dove and Robin Thomson (both Watsonians). Robin beat Tony Lin Baledent of George Watson’s who shot one of the five 100s recorded in round 1. Other winners were Amanda Puchalla (Edin Univ) on another countback tie-break, Adam Dove, Alasdair Horne, James Brown, Robin Thomson (both Watsonians), Josh Mitchell (Edin Univ) and Charlotte Kim (George Watson’s).

In round 2 there were wins for Adam over Amanda, Alasdair over James, Robin over Josh (but only on the 2nd tie-break rule where Robin had scored one 10.8 to Josh’s none) and Sinclair over Charlotte.

The first semi-final was a very high-scoring affair with Alasdair rolling back the years to edge out Adam by 200 to 199. Extremely good shooting from both. The standard was maintained in the other semi, with Sinclair scoring 199 to overcome Robin’s 194.

The final kept the standards up with Sinclair again shooting 199, but Alasdair couldn’t repeat his feat and scored ‘only’ 197 to take the runner-up spot.

I’d like to thank Balerno & Currie for allowing us to use their range, and also Mark Westwood of the home club for running the computer controlling the electronic targets. The event could not have taken place without him.

WFH