Where it all began – Neil and Helen Critchell

Back in 2006, novice rim-fire rifle shooter Helen was asked to volunteer to take on the League Secretary role for her county small-bore rifle association and she said ‘yes’ only when told that the workload would be barely a couple of days a year… For every League Secretary out there, they will know that a couple of days’ work a year to run two seasonal postal leagues doesn’t come close!

Long-suffering programmer husband, Neil, stepped up to the plate and offered to develop an online platform to run the leagues digitally. Between the pair of them they had no idea what they were doing when it came to running target shooting leagues, but with the help of the county association, the League Stats Officer and league participants they developed (and redeveloped a number of times) a site that everyone became very happy to use. The time it saved Helen each season was incredible and the one big hit with club participants was that they no longer had to send their targets to the League Secretary every round. As a result, more and more clubs across the country learned of our efficient and easy system and started entering our leagues. We grew from a little county league, with about 10-12 club entries, to a cross-country league with around 75 clubs regularly entering. Two further league organisers have also been using the system to run their successful leagues for a number of years, and soon our national governing body will also be using the site.

Throughout the years we have listened to feedback from our end-users, and have always considered our club captains first and foremost when designing the system, understanding that not all of them would be happy changing from the old ways to managing their league entries on the internet. But they were remarkable! They adapted and accepted the changes and rewarded us with loyalty and commitment to our leagues over the years. Our aim throughout has been to provide a platform that everyone could use, regardless of age or PC experience, and we believe we have achieved that. We know, more or less now (after all these years!), what is required to run successful online target shooting leagues and have dedicated our time to developing a site that makes life easier for all the volunteers out there who offer their time to either run leagues or manage shooting clubs up and down the United Kingdom.

Helen is still volunteering as League Secretary for her county association but never went beyond being a novice shooter, and (thanks to the Covid Lockdown) Neil is working on creating our newest and best version of the platform yet. If there is any feature you would like to see on the site, then do let us know. We are continually updating this site and have a very long list of things we would like to do to enhance our users’ experience. Those features will come in due course. We have run this site as volunteers from the outset, but with the system now being so popular, and with the all the development work carried out recently, we have decided to turn it into a commercial venture.

We would like to welcome you to our site and assure you of our commitment to providing the very best user experience and friendliest tech support.