May 18, 1999 — At first inspection, Jodie Briggs seems like the typical 16-year-old girl at Johnson High.
She’s eagerly awaiting the end of her sophomore year in high school. She suffers from a mild addiction to shopping. And she has a slight crush on that dreamy Ben Affleck guy.
Yep, Jodie seems pretty typical — that is until you see her fire a gun.
Jodie is one of the country’s top young talents in the Olympic sport of air pistol shooting, but you wouldn’t be able to guess it from meeting her.
Hers is an unassuming presence. Barely five feet tall with straight blond hair parted down the middle, Jodie speaks in soft, high-pitched tones.
But this petite girl who belongs to the scholarly Beta Club at Johnson and in February was named to the school’s Sweetheart Court is the same sharpshooter who earned the bronze medal in air pistol shooting at the National Women’s Junior Olympic Championships in Colorado Springs, Colo. in March.
“(My friends) think it’s weird that I do it, but they don’t say too much about it,” said Jodie as her father Joe drove us down to the Wolf Creek Olympic Shooting Complex, just south of Atlanta, on Friday. “They all want to see me in the Olympics one day, but …”
Jodie’s voice trailed off. She’s very modest about her abilities.
Jodie can afford to remain close-mouthed. Her accomplishments — and her coaches — do the talking for her.
“Jodie is a very quick study,” said JP O’Connor, a coach for the Wolf Creek Young Shooters Association. “She’s been shooting for less than two years and she’s already shooting at a national level for junior women. Depending on her interest level, she has a very, very, very strong, bright future.”
Jodie showed signs of that strong, bright future during her years in competitive BB shooting with Hall County 4-H. Between grades five and eight, Jodie developed into one of the best young BB shooters in the state. Just ask her coach.
“She was a good BB shooter,” said Joe Briggs, who coached his daughter during her BB phase. “She does have a lot of patience and that’s part of what you have to have in (air pistol). You can’t let your emotions control your shots. She’s just very disciplined in what she does.”
Joe, an environmental engineer who also operates a Flowery Branch poultry farm, is now less coach and more spectator. He has to be. Jodie is just too good.
“She’s gone so far beyond what I could help her with, I’m definitely not her coach anymore,” said Joe. “I just carry her bags.”
I helped with the bags Friday night, tagging along for Jodie’s practice session at the state-of-the-art Wolf Creek facility, an indoor shooter’s paradise built for the 1996 Olympics.
Also along for the trip was the other half of Jodie’s support crew, her mother Jean.
“I guess you don’t usually think about girls getting involved in shooting sports, but that’s one thing I think is so neat about it,” said Mrs. Briggs. “It’s not the typical thing that the girls do. But she just seems to have a natural ability.”
That natural ability likely did not come from Jean. A while back, she was coaxed into shooting an air pistol. Once. Which, until Friday night, was one shot more than I.
In air pistol shooting, an Olympic sport since 1988, competitors use .177 caliber pistols, either air or gas-powered, to fire lead pellets at targets — very small targets, I noted as we approached the range — 10 meters away.
“It’s always seemed big to me,” said Jodie of target, which, I was informed, is much larger than those for BB guns.
“But it is small compared to a lot of sports targets,” she quickly added, in an obvious attempt to sooth my ego.
Jodie has a way of making the target look large, however. She consistently hits within the nine-point ring, which is all of 1.06 inches in diameter.
In competition, female shooters have 75 minutes to complete 40 shots at the 10-ring target, which is just over seven inches wide.
The 75 minutes are welcome. The sport requires so much concentration, is so mentally taxing that competitors often have to sit down and regroup between shots. It’s surprisingly physically demanding, as well. Imagine standing with a two-pound weight at the end of your outstretched arm for an hour.
A perfect score for women is 400, which has never before been accomplished. World class is 375. Jodie averages just below 360, or nearly nine points per shot. Not bad for a girl who just got her driver’s license.
Unlike Jodie, I made the target seem quite small. A four here. A two there. And the occasional shot that somehow pinged off of the metal frame of the light illuminating the target.
I eventually began to get somewhat consistent, grouping my shots together, which I was told was a good sign. I’m assuming it was a bad sign that I was grouping them around the four ring.
I shot a perfect ten with my 49th shot, and I should have quit there. A six and a seven later and I was done. Both my arm and my ego needed a rest.
Jodie said she had had a bad day of practice. I told her about mine and I think it made her feel better.
We left Wolf Creek and the sharp-shooting Jodie was back to being a typical 16-year-old. She has little use for guns when away from her sport. To her an air pistol and a target are like a basketball and a hoop.
“I don’t think I could kill an animal or anything like that,” giggled Jodie. “Well … unless it’s a snake or something.”