You.

It's a lot about focus, having a clear mind, and just just focus on that one target, that one in front of.

You.

Can hit the target no matter what because it only moves so many directions. But what really catches you is when you start thinking too much and getting ahead of yourself.

So many times you find kids that are on sports teams that spend all that time sitting on the bench. There's no bench warmers here. There is no second string kids. Everybody shoots, everybody competes.

My name is Roland Thompson, and I'm a sophomore at Bramlington Edison High School. I've been shooting competitively for about four years now.

My name is Sophie. I'm a senior at Cedaroli High School. There's about around 13 teens here that are competing for the top school in our district.

I'm David Bradbury. I am the head coach of the Newport High School Clay Target team. We have our local gun club, and in recent years it's really struggled because ammunition costs are going through the roof. Targets are more expensive. We do not have a significant number of community members as part of our club. Under the age of 50, our club membership has significantly decreased. The club that I grew up in the 80s that had 100 plus participants members, now we're down to 30 or 40. A gentleman part of our club, he approached me and said, you know, Dave, if we don't do something to get the younger generation involved and younger families involved, our club and our shooting sports around here, they're going to die, literally. He suggested that we follow the lead of a school that is about an hour and a half north of us, right close to the Canadian border. They had started a Clay Target team, and so we followed their lead. We did the same thing. And the first year we only had five or six or seven kids. The next year we had ten or twelve. The next year we had 20.

Last year we had 35. This year, we're hoping to have 40 plus.

Hi. My name is John Nelson. I am the President of the USA Clay Target League. The history with the league really started with the problems in the hunting and shooting sport community. That really has been happening over the past 30 to 40 years with declining participation in both of those sports. And so when the founder of the program named Jim Sable and I used to work together, he started looking at his local club, wondering why there isn't any kids participating at his club, because he was one of the younger members at the age of 60. And so Jim had the concept of saying is, hey, how do we make Clay Target a school sponsored sport? As you can imagine, in the early days, we struggled with trying to go to schools and trying to say, hey, we have a great sport that all your kids should participate in. And everyone can be included. And it doesn't matter what gender you are, your physical capabilities, and you don't have to be the tallest and the fastest and the strongest and all these great things that we could do. And then we would say, and, oh, by the way, it involves a gun.

And so we had an awful lot of doors closed on us right when we told them about that. It involves a shotgun, but eventually through proof of performance and our safety record, and when you compare it against other high school sports is a lot of administrators at the school level really could see the safety practices that we have in place that really make this sport the safest sport in high school. And so from there, we started to not only increase the number of kids participating in the sport here in our home state of Minnesota, but then we had other states nearby that wanted to join the party. We have about 34 state high school clay target leagues, we have two college clay target leagues, and we also have a home school clay target league. And so collectively, this year we hosted over 49,000 student athletes that were on over 1600 teams. Now it is so much easier to go to the schools with 1600 plus other teams behind you that are saying, hey, this league has never had an injury, and no other sport in high school can say that.

I mean, you got 100 kids here walking around with guns and there's not a worry in the world about their abilities. Every one of these kids is second nature to them.

I really like the environment that Trap offers. It's kind of cool to get to do a sport like this since a lot of times school and stuff is pretty taboo against guns. But I think that it is really nice to have high schoolers able to use guns and get comfortable with the usage of them so that they can go out into the world not having a fear of them.

We have a lot of support. We have a lot of people that groups that sponsor the kids for shooting and sponsor shells and sponsor sweatshirts and all kinds of stuff to support the kids in their endeavors, and we've had groups try to shut us down. Yeah, we have. I've been through that before, too, like, guns don't belong to schools and Burlington Edison doesn't belong shooting. So over the almost 30 years I've.

Seen it all, all of these efforts have started with moms and dads and a couple of teachers who have said, we need to be proactive about this and let's get something established and get the ball rolling. Largely a grassroots effort for folks who are in a generation similar to mine, who grew up experiencing and enjoying certain things that in today's environment are becoming more and more restrictive. If there's not a proactive effort to embrace and encourage and reestablish so many of these awesome things, they'll dwindle away.

I think it has shaped how hard I work because I put a lot of time and hours into shooting dedication. I think that's definitely branched out from just shooting into my life, working hard and getting it done.

A lot of it's just that determination to stay with them. You can miss that first target, but you got to shoot the next 24, and you might want to shoot 100 and you miss the first or the second ones, but you have to reach deep and continue to work for every single one of them. You can't just give up. So it's that determination, that mental awareness, the concentration. You got to beat yourself. You got to beat yourself physically, you got to beat yourself mentally. You got to beat the guy next to you. You just keep trying, keep plugging away at it over and over and over again to get that one more target.