USAMU Soldier Wins National Pistol Championship
Report based on story by Lars Dalseide for NRA Blog
This afternoon, SSG Patrick Franks of the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit walked off the Rodriguez range as the new NRA National Pistol Champion. This is his first-ever National Pistol Championship — and it didn’t come easy. With a final score of 2649-147X, Patrick’s victory was by a slim margin.
“He won by 16 Xs,” said Match Director Tom Hughes. “I can’t remember one ever being this close.”
2014 has been a great year for Patrick Franks. “This year was my first 1st-place win at Interservice (the 55th Interservice Pistol Championships at Fort Benning),” said Franks. “A lot of our team matches at Interservice and at Canton were milestone performances and looking back at those I just kept going with it while I’m here.”
“I thought I was shooting pretty well,” Franks continued. “Good for my average, good for being up here. Just tried concentrating on the team matches and ended up coming out better than I expected. Just enough.”
The USAMU Pistol Team enjoyed a clean sweep of the individual matches, won the .45 caliber team match, and secured the overall Team title. Congratulations to SSG Patrick Franks on winning his first National Pistol Championship, to SFC James Henderson for taking second, and to SGT Greg Markowski for taking third. (Markowski also won the Revolver Match). 13-time NRA Pistol Champion Brian Zins, a few weeks out of hip surgery, finished 10th.
Here are photos from the CMP Photo Gallery for the 2014 National Trophy Pistol Matches at Camp Perry.
Similar Posts:
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- SFC Henderson Named Top Military Marksman for 2009
- SSG Brandon Green Named MMA Soldier of the Year for 2013
- The Pistols of Perry — EIC Rimfire and Service Pistol Matches
Tags: 1911, Camp Perry, Pistol, Service Pistol, USAMU
In the story USAMU Soldier Wins National Pistol Championship it is stated that you have to go back 14 years to find someone besides Zins or Hemphill that won the individual aggregate(Harrison Trophy) at the National Pistol Matches. If you look at the NRA website you will see that Jim Henderson has won it twice and Steve Reiter won his last of his five championships.
Editor: John, you are right, and we have deleted that statement (about Zins and Hemphill). Here is the list of National Pistol champions: http://compete.nra.org/documents/pdf/compete/nat-trophy/tro-008.pdf . This story came from the NRA Blog, but it looks like we need to fact-check the stories before syndicating them.