Shooting star Charliese Erskine aiming for world champs

Riding her horse at Sandy Point on the outskirts of Invercargill, Charliese Erskine would hear the shots going off at the nearby gun club and wonder what it would be like to give that sport a go.

Three years later, the Southland Girls’ High School student is one of the best clay target exponents for her age in the country and is hoping to go to the world championships in San Antonio later in the year.

It’s been a remarkable rise for the SBS Bank Academy Southland foundation year athlete, punctuated by an outstanding performance at the recent Australian national championships in Wagga Wagga where she picked up 12 medals across the junior, ladies and graded competitions.

Charliese’s haul included four Australian titles, highlighted by the Australian junior champion of champions title.

Not bad considering her first taste of international competition was only confirmed at the last minute.

With the Australian championships rescheduled due to weather concerns, the Erskines were nearly caught out by the calendar change.

“It was real last minute, we didn’t know we were going until like three days before so I didn’t do much training leading up to it, but it worked out to be ok,” an understated Charliese said.

In fact, the late scramble saw the requisite gun permits - a challenging process - only confirmed the day before Charliese was due to fly to Australia.

It also meant her parents had to postpone a wedding anniversary trip to Fiji which had originally been scheduled so as not to conflict with the original Australian date.

“Normally leading up to an event like that I would do a lot more training, it was good as well because I didn’t have lots of time to get nervous and not many people knew I was going, so I didn’t have a lot of expectations,” Charliese said.

“I was just expecting to go there for the experience, so it was pretty cool to come away with 12 medals.”

Charliese’s introduction to sport shooting came when her father Cliff and some mates joined the Southland Gun Club near Invercargill.

Charliese had signalled an interest prompted by those Sandy Point horse rides and her mum suggested that she tag along.

“They took me once and I started beating them, that’s how it all started,” she said.

“I was shooting pretty good scores when I first started and everyone was shocked at the club with this little girl coming in and shooting better scores than some of the guys, that was pretty cool.”

Helped along by her father, local shooters Jarrod Watt and Lindsay Rodgers, and Marlborough-based New Zealand skeet representative Andy Peters, Charliese has progressed from school competitions through to the top grades.

She has a bunch of national titles to her name and at the recent South Island championships took out the national overall title against both men and women in the challenging doubles discipline.

The big goal this year is the world championships for skeet, Charliese’s favourite discipline - subject to finding the money required to attend.

“Hopefully I can get the funding. I’m off to uni next year so it would be a cool opportunity before I get busy with university.”