Gold medallist Greene has Games podium in her sights
By John Soper
for CBC Sports Online

At 14, Brenda Greene is the youngest member of her air rifle team, but she's the one with the target shooting range in basement of her home.

The Grade 9 student lives in the tiny St. Mary's Bay community of St. Joseph's, about an hour's drive from St. John's, Nfld.

Brenda Greene and her teammates hone their shooting skills in the basement of her St. Joseph's, Nfld. home  Watch the CBC News report

The other members of her team are Grade 12 students Wayne Nolan and Darren Dobbin, and Grade 11 student Laurie Hearn.

They practise three or four nights a week at the Greene's bungalow. The basement range is set up with a target retrieval system using wires and pulleys.

From a distance of 10 metres, the shooter aims for a bull's eye the size of a pin prick on a paper target.

"There's a little itty bitty dot, a little tiny white dot in the centre of a big black circle, and that's your pinpoint" explains Greene. "That's what you're aiming for every single shot you take."

To help maintain a steady aim, Greene wears a 13-kilogram kit of specially designed clothes and shoes. The padding helps keep the motion of breathing and heartbeat from reaching the trigger finger.

Greene picked up target shooting as a member of the 2895 Enright Memorial Royal Army Cadet Corps, at St. Catherine’s Academy.

The corps has won the provincial air rifle championships two years in a row. And last May, the corps's six-member team won the cadets' national air rifle competition in Comox, B.C.

Greene won an individual gold medal in Comox. Nolan took a silver, and Hearn a bronze.

When they arrived home, a motorcade escorted them the last 40 kilometres from the Trans-Canada Highway.

Their proud Member of the House of Assembly, Fabian Manning, congratulated them in the legislature.

Newfoundland and Labrador has never won a medal in a shooting competition at the Canada Games, but Greene isn't deterred.

"We've all been setting personal bests constantly," she says. "Every time we shoot, we shot a personal best."

This month, they were in Toronto. Greene shot with 90-per-cent accuracy, making her a top-ranked junior shooter.

"We're getting better and better, and hopefully, when we go to the games, we'll be able to shop another personal best," she says.

Greene sees the games in Bathurst and Campbellton, N.B. as a "great opportunity."

"I can remember when I was in Grade 6 or 7 a girl from my school went to the Canada Games. Everyone was amazed," she says. "I never thought I would be doing it a couple of years later."

The chef de mission for Newfoundland and Labrador's Canada Games team, Glenn Littlejohn, said the air rifle team has one big hurdle to overcome.

He says at the games, the teams have to shoot both standing and lying down, unlike cadet competitions, which require shooters to fire only from the prone position.

Greene and her teammates will be participating in the second week of the games.