Glen Strandberg
Sports Editor

The Forest Lake Sportsmen’s Club was in full entertaining mode on Friday, Aug. 3, when they hosted the 2007 Professional Outdoor Media Association’s (POMA) Field Day event.

According to their web site, “POMA is a group of individual communicators and Corporate Partners who believe in, defend, support and promote the heritage of hunting, fishing, shooting and traditional outdoor sports through writing, photography and other means.

“By doing so, members hope to educate the general public about these sports and encourage more participation in them. The organization serves the membership by helping members grow professionally, improve their skills, better their working environments and enhance their businesses.”

The three-day POMA conference ran from Aug. 2-5, and was brought to the area by Visit Minneapolis North.

Dave Madison of the Sportsmen’s Club said they had approximately 65 outdoor writers and close to 80 corporate partners, like Remington, Winchester and Optics, attend the Field Day.

“What a great opportunity for us to be gracious hosts,” he said.

“There were giants in the industry there; we received so many compliments on the quality of our facility.”

Incorporated in 1937, the Forest Lake Sportsmen’s Club is a member-owned Shooting Sports Center dedicated to providing its members and the shooting community with a safe environment to enjoy their shooting interests.

The club is active with educating and training youth as well as the shooting public, and also shares its facilities with the police, military and special interest groups.

Over the past eight years, the club has grown to 102 acres and added numerous ranges.

In 2000 alone they built a new 50-yard handgun range while also adding a fully enclosed rifle and handgun range for year-round shooting; installed new lights on trap and skeet ranges; and constructed new sporting clays course.

Since then there is now a second sporting clays course, a new archery course, a sixth trap range, voice-activated traps, a 400-yard rifle range, a 3-D archery range, a world-class handgun range, and they started both handgun and archery shooting leagues.

The Forest Lake Sportsmen’s Club is located at 4648 240th St. N., and the ranges are open to the public.

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