By AGFC
Special to Front Porch

Pull!

The orange clay target soars into the air. The shooter follows its path and fires. The target shatters.

It’s all part of one of the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission’s (AGFC) newest and most popular programs. The Arkansas Youth Shooting Sports Program (AYSSP) is now one of the largest shooting competitions in the nation in only its second year. In 2008, almost 2,400 shooters competed, up from 900 in 2007. Anyone in grades 6–12 can compete despite size, gender or physical aptitude.

The program already has shooters sighting in on national and international competition.

Kayle Browning of Wooster is one of them. Browning recently shot her way into a competition tour in Europe in 2009.

She doesn’t hesitate to tell her goal in trapshooting. “I want to make the Olympics.”

That would be the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London.

Browning is a 16-year-old junior at Greenbrier High School. She is already a veteran in shotgun shooting events and attended a session at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo. when she was 13.

Last spring, she led her Greenbrier trapshooting team to a third place finish in the AYYSP championships.

More recently, she competed in the USA Shooting championships at San Antonio. She took first place in the women’s junior division. That competition earned her a spot on the 12-member team that will go to the world championships in August 2009 at Maribor, Slovenia. She will also shoot in competitions in Germany, Italy and Great Britain.

That USA team of 12 is in four divisions — men, women, junior men and junior women. The 12 who made the team at the San Antonio event included seven shooters who were in the 2008 Olympics at Beijing.

Browning was third in the qualifying round at San Antonio, and then won the finals. She broke 23 of 25 targets in the last round and won by a single target. She missed by one place making the women’s USA team.

The Olympics won’t come easily for Browning. Not only does she have to beat stiff competition to make the team, the American team itself then has to qualify for one of only 19 Olympic slots out of about 200 nations competing in trapshooting.

In the meantime, Browning maintains good grades at Greenbrier High and plays on the Lady Panther basketball team.

Browning started shooting shotguns at an early age. Her father, Tommy Browning, is a five-time national champion in sporting clays — a different game from trap but with many of the basics of gun handling and shooting skills. Along with her father, Kayle is working with veteran trap coach Brett Erickson.

“Trapshooting is 98 percent mental,” Kayle Browning said. “When you are shooting, your focus is huge, just huge. You call for a target, and you have three-tenths of a second before it comes out.”

International trapshooting differs greatly from the more common trapshooting in Arkansas and across the nation.

In regular trap, targets leave a single throwing station or house at varying angles at about 40 miles per hour. In international trap, often called bunker trap, the targets come from one of 15 different stations at speeds from 60 to 80 mph.

Kayle shoots a 12-gauge Krieghoff trap gun with a 30-inch barrel. It weighs 10 pounds.

Strength and stamina are important in trapshooting, too.

“Lifting weights in basketball helps me with the shooting,” she said. “In these competitions, you are shooting 250 rounds over about 10 hours.”

Another dedicated worker and rising shooting star is Cord Riley. In just two years, he’s ascended rapidly in the ranks of competitive trapshooting. Riley lives with his parents, Cornelia and Randy Riley and younger sister Brooke, on a poultry farm and cattle ranch near Hindsville, west of Huntsville.

His father got him into competition trapshooting with the Arkansas Trap Association.

Riley’s start in the sport was humbling. He broke only 11 of 25 targets. But he learned quickly, putting in the hard work shooting 200 practice rounds weekly. Last year, he led his Huntsville High School team to a state championship. In the championship finals at Remington Gun Club, in Lonoke, Riley broke 243 of 250 targets. That led to him receiving one of only 18 invitations for Olympic training last October at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo.

That’s stepping fast for a 17-year-old. His coach, Steve Johnson, an agriculture teacher at Huntsville High, also got to go to the Olympic Center to get coaches training.

Riley’s long-range goal, like Browning’s, is less than four years away — the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

“That’s my goal in trapshooting,” Riley said. “I want to make it to the Olympic Games, but that is a long ways off.”

Riley uses a Perazzi over and under 12-gauge shotgun.

 “I’m pretty consistent at 23 and 24 (of a 25-target round),” Riley said. “The shooting is 10 percent skill and 90 percent head. When you are on your timing with the team, everything just falls into place.”

Riley competes in the AYSSP with his high school teammates. From the start, the Game & Fish program has found eager participants. Many more are getting into the game this school year.

“The program far exceeded anything we could ever imagine,” said Chuck Woodson, AYSSP coordinator. “We are looking for ways to expand the program.

“I am amazed at the stories I receive weekly from parents praising the program — from stories relating to kids learning gun safety to stories about parents going hunting with their kids for the first time or stories about non-athletic kids being able to compete in a sport and win trophies. When you see tears in a parent’s eyes while they’re telling the story, it gives you a true sense of what the program has accomplished.”

The program teaches students how to safely operate a firearm, while also teaching them to respect each other and to do well in school.

“The program has had a big impact on our students,” said Riley’s coach, Steve Johnson. “Some of our kids were in danger of failing school, and now they’re graduating because of the program.”

Besides improving grades and attitudes, the program reaches youth who may never hunt and shows them how rewarding the outdoors can be.

Are all of the hard work and long hours of practice worth it? Only time will tell for Cord Riley and Kayle Browning’s Olympic dreams. Yet for thousands of other shooters in AGFC’s Arkansas Youth Shooting Sports Program, the benefits of the program make the question easy to answer.

It’s a definite “Yes!”