Membership and Activity levels

Membership of the club at the time of the AGM stands at 335 members. of which some 270 joined in October, 251 of which joined during Fresher's Week. This represents an increase of over a hundred members from last year, and a huge improvement in the Fresher's Week numbers, but also the third highest membership figure the club has had in the past twenty-five years, and it makes us the fourth-largest sports club in College. Looking at the membership figures for the past two decades or so shows that this represents an upward trend (see Figure ) despite a certain amount of annual fluctuation, as well as a slump in membership over the past few years caused by the departure of a large group of our core shooters at the end of 1994.

Figure: DURC membership trend since 1970

Of these 335 members, 110 have shot at least once, giving an active membership of 32.8%. A closer look at the activity statistics shows that our most active term was Hillary term, as per usual, but also that there were relatively few people that only shot once - some 5 or 6 out of 110. This indicates that if we can get people to come down and try at least once, that they tend to return to try again - something to note for next year.

Looking at the demographics, we see that we have approximately a 2:1 ration of men to women in the club - this has been the average for some time now, but given that the lady shooters tend to be better than the gentlemen, this is a situation we would like to see changed to a 1:1 ratio.

The most well-represented faculty was Engineering, with 50 engineering students as members, and a further 30 in various management science courses, and another 32 in computer science and ICT. Arts was the next faculty, with 50 members, followed by Science with 36 and Medecine with 29. The other members fall into the ``other'' category, including Alumni and Staff members. In general, most of our members were Junior Freshmen (a total of 147) with the Senior Freshmen, Sophisters and Postgrads all roughly equal on approximately 30-40 members each. Our ages range from 17 (when joining the club) to 55 years old - though the majority of shooters are currently 18 or 19, with the next largest group being the over-40s - a rather unique demographic amoung TCD's sports clubs!.

This year's has see us use a total of 19289 rounds of .22 ammunition, of which approximately 10,000 were shot on normal training nights and the rest in competition. This is up significantly on previous years, but we still have a ways to go to meet the previous record levels of 40,000 rounds per year (which were set in 1987-89)

Looking at the top ten of the ladder (the standard for judgeing our performance for the year) shows an average of 92.89 : not as high as our halycon days, but very respectable indeed. Looking at the last 12 cards shot shows a better picture of our current standards though : 93.38 as an average, with the top 8 having an average over 90. Also to note are the three possibles shot this year : congradulations to Ray Reilly, John Keeney and me.