The King's No 1 team - Morris Stevenson, John Brosnahan, Sam Young and Campbell Wright - recently trumped 14 other teams, including three from King's, to win the national secondary schools postal shooting competition for the second year in succession.
The competition required teams to shoot locally and send results to Wellington to be tallied and compared with those of the other teams.
Shooting over four rounds, King's scored 1918.71, beating Wellington College by 18.05 points.
Individually, Stevenson shot better than anyone, racking up 194.07 and beating Wellington College's Sergey Kladnitski by 5.01 points.
Brosnahan finished fourth, while Young was eighth and Wright 13th.
This weekend, the boys will shoot in the national secondary schools shoulder-to-shoulder competition, and coach John Stanway is confident of success.
''Last year, we came sixth in Palmerston North, but this year, with the results we have had, these boys are favourites.
''The boys have done really well. They trained really hard this year - they have been doing extra training for the competition.
''They are shooting three times a week regularly and then, on competition weeks, they are shooting four times.''
The national competition will be shot over three rounds tomorrow, before South Island and North Island teams are selected to compete against each other tomorrow night.
From there, a New Zealand secondary schools team will be picked to compete in a postal shoot against England on Sunday.
With shooters going through $6-$10 of ammunition at each of the three or four weekly shoots, co-coach Lindsay Young, father of Sam, said smallbore shooting was not just a time commitment.
''I just got a bill for Sam's ammunition for the season for $900. It's not like a rugby ball - you can't just run down the range and get the bullets back.''
King's also won the Otago secondary school championship last month.
Both coaches and King's teacher Vicky Jopson will travel to Rangiora with the team.
-by Robert Van Royen
