No one had to leave home: Forbush Falcons Rifle Camp 2026

16 athletes from five schools. Five days on the line. A CMP-sanctioned Cup match to close it out. And not one family had to drive 400 miles to get there.

A camp worth staying home for

For a junior air rifle athlete in North Carolina, a week of national-camp instruction has traditionally lived at the Civilian Marksmanship Program's junior air rifle camps in Anniston, Alabama—a drive, a week away, and a cost that put it out of reach for a lot of families. Rich Weiser—North Carolina's CMP State Director, a high school rifle coach, and Falken's founder—kept coming back to one question.

What if the closest thing to a CMP camp that a North Carolina kid could get was not four hundred miles away, but twenty minutes away?

Rich Weiser, No One Had to Leave Home

The answer was Falcon '26: the Forbush Falcons Rifle Camp, held July 20–24, 2026 at Forbush High School in East Bend, North Carolina, and presented by Falken, Ltd. and Bowdark Consulting, Inc. Rich organized the camp and directed its matches, and Camp Director CW3 James Tiddy, USA (Ret.) ran the range. Athletes came from five schools: Forbush, Reagan, Davie County, West Forsyth, and Starmount. Falken's name was on the week. The athletes owned it.

Five days, two tracks, one motto

Monday opened with a diagnostic match—every athlete on the record before the first lesson. The results split the camp into two tracks built on the CMP camp progression: a Blue team of experienced competitors coached by Sahi Weiser—Rich's daughter, a West Forsyth JROTC graduate, and a two-time team captain there—and a Red team of newer competitors coached by Angus Babcock. Both tracks worked the same ground: equipment fundamentals; position work in prone, standing, and kneeling; the shot process; and the mental game that holds it all together.

CMSgt Doug McIntyre, USAF (Ret.), MSG Brian Hayes, USA (Ret.), SFC David Holley, USA (Ret.), and Major Richard Sugg, USA (Ret.) worked the line, and the athletes got sessions from two visiting guests: Wofford College head rifle coach Seth Flanagan, whose program trains and competes on Falken, and South Carolina CMP State Director LTC Paul Davis, USA (Ret.). Every athlete passed a JROTC marksmanship safety exam before handling a rifle, and range officers walked the line from Monday's first diagnostic string to Friday's last shot.

The loudest moment of the week was not the sanctioned match. An unscored exhibition final put athletes on the line in front of a cheering crowd that held roughly 90 decibels for at least 30 minutes—an Apple Watch on the line logged it. Finals pressure, rehearsed before it counts. Through all of it, the camp motto held: Focus Creates Champions.

Friday's Cup match

The camp closed with a CMP-sanctioned Cup match—a full 3×20 course of fire across prone, standing, and kneeling. Of the 16 athletes, 10 earned CMP Achievement Pins—one gold, five silver, and four bronze—and 10 personal records fell during the match. Every athlete left with an official CMP score and classification. For many of them, it was their first.

The leaderboard itself—every name and every number—is Rich's story to share, and he shares it in full in his retrospective.

The awards that say the most

Scores tell one story. The coaching staff watched for another all week, and four character awards closed the camp: Falken Athlete of the Camp, for the athlete who best embodied what the week was for; Heart of a Champion, for composure when it counted most; Dialed In, for the most disciplined focus on the line; and Resilience, for the best recovery of the week.

The first of those carries our name, and this year it went to an athlete you will not find at the top of the leaderboard—which is exactly the point. We cannot think of a better use of it.

The quiet work Nexus did all week

Falken's part in that story was mostly invisible, which is how it should be. Nexus ran the operations behind the camp—the same platform any organization can use, nothing custom, nothing staged.

For the camp staff

Registration ran through the camp's landing page on Nexus, where a parent or a coach could register an athlete and pay in the same sitting—no paper form, no mailed check, no phone call. Check-in, relay assignments, and classification came off those same records on Monday morning, and Jackeline and Briana Weiser—the founder's family worked this camp end to end—moved every camper through the door without a stack of paperwork. Results for every scored event, from the Day 1 diagnostic through the sanctioned match, lived in Nexus.

For the coaches

Targets came off the line and were scanned into Nexus—after matches, and even after practice courses of fire—turning paper into shot-by-shot data instead of a number on a clipboard. Nexus AI analytics surfaced the answers a coach could act on between sessions: where a group was drifting, which position was breaking down in the back half of a string, how a pattern had shifted since the day before. The coaches made the calls; the platform made sure they were made with the athlete's actual targets in front of them. At a five-day camp, the turnaround is one night: Tuesday's training plan could answer Monday's targets.

For the athletes

Every registration—completed by a parent or a coach—started a Falken athlete profile, and everything the athlete shot all week landed on it. The Day 1 diagnostic, the practice courses of fire, the sanctioned Cup match—shot by shot, all of it stays with the athlete, and it belongs to the athlete and their family, not to us. When these 16 walk back into their school seasons this fall, their coaches are not starting from zero. The camp becomes the first chapter of a training history instead of a week that disappears into a folder.

It took a community

Bowdark Consulting, Inc. co-presented the camp with Falken. The Civilian Marksmanship Program sanctioned the final match, so every score counts beyond the gym it was fired in. And Forbush High School opened its range, its classrooms, and its air-conditioned gymnasium in the middle of July—which, if you have ever worn a shooting jacket in a North Carolina summer, you understand.

Rich wrote a longer, more personal retrospective on the week—the full results, the award winners, and 10 lessons for other CMP state directors thinking about a regional camp of their own—in No One Had to Leave Home on LinkedIn.

Run one where you are

The point of Falcon '26 was never that one camp went well. It is that a regional, CMP-caliber camp is repeatable—by a school, a club, or a state director with a range and a week. None of it requires Falken; a committed coach with a range and a clipboard can run a great camp. But the registration, payments, scoring, and analytics that carried this one are available to every organization on Nexus today, and the Falcon '26 camp page is a working example. If your program wants to bring the camp to your athletes instead of the other way around, we would love to help.

Steady Hands. Focused Minds. Never Miss.

About Falken

Falken builds marksmanship match management software and athlete-development tools for rifle and pistol programs. The platform provides scoring, analytics, broadcast production, and program management to clubs, junior teams, collegiate programs, and competition hosts. Falken is headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Photography by Briana Weiser. Athlete photos appear with media release consent confirmed through each athlete's program.