Worthington at forefront of booming sport of high school trapshooting

By: Daniel Kerwin, Worthington Daily Globe

WORTHINGTON — The sport of trapshooting is entering a new era in Minnesota, and Worthington is one of the towns leading the charge.

Two years ago there was little semblance of an organized high school trapshooting league in the state.

This year, 29 high school teams will be competing in third season of the Minnesota State High School Clay Target League — a huge jump from last year’s number of 14 teams.

The year before, there were only six teams.

If it hadn’t been for an innovation that Worthington High School trapshooting team coaches Aaron Sieve, Chris Kruse and Scott Oberloh helped to come up with, the league might not exist at all.

The innovation — for trapshooting competitions to be recorded over the internet rather than having both teams shoot in the same location.

The idea came from the Worthington coaches and WHS class of 1981 graduate Ken Sonnenfeld, who now lives in St. Francis.

“(Ken) kind of heard that there was some trapshooting going on in the Minnetonka area,” Oberloh said. “There were four teams, and they were shooting in the metro area head to head.”

The four teams competing against each other in the metro area had started the ball rolling, but having teams from St. Francis and Worthington travel to the Twin Cities for weekly competitions would have been a logistical nightmare and terribly cost ineffective.

“We couldn’t obviously shoot with them because they shot head-to-head once a week,” Oberloh said. “They’d all get together at the gun club to shoot and compete. We couldn’t do that, so we said, ‘You shoot Monday nights, we’ll shoot Thursday nights and we’ll e-mail you our score when we’re done.”

The idea caught on, and Worthington and St. Francis used the format to compete against the metro-area teams in 2009, the first year of existence for the Worthington team and the league overall.

The first season was capped by the first state competition between the teams, which was held at Minneapolis Gun Club.

“They said, ‘Hey, we’ll host this, you come up and we’ll pay for the birds,’” Oberloh said. “They did a great job hosting us. All we had to do was bring our shells up and our kids.”

Word started to spread around the state of what Worthington and St. Francis had been able to do by creating the online format for the league. The next season, six other teams from greater Minnesota joined the league, along with two further metro-area teams.

Last year the state shoot was held again, making it the annual competition to end the season for the league.

As the league has grown, so has the Worthington High School team.

The team began with six students in 2009, and last year 19 students participated.

This year Oberloh is hoping the number is closer to 30 — which would max out the roster (roster size is limited to 10 students per coach).

The team will be holding its sign-up night and information meeting on Monday night in the WHS cafeteria starting at 6 p.m.

While the sport isn’t officially backed by the school in the same manner as more traditional varsity sports, students are able to letter in trapshooting if they fulfill the right criteria.

“They compare it to high school bowling or high school debate,” Oberloh said. “It’s like a club sport, basically.”

When the season gets underway after a two to three week training period, the team competes by recording a score on Thursday and posting it online. The team it is competing against will do the same on whichever day it chooses to shoot, and the scores become official on Saturdays at midnight.

With the increase in the number of teams, the league has now been split into four conferences.

During each week of competition three points are at stake. The first point is based on the top shooters for each team, the second point is based on the best five scores for the team out of a group of seven pre-picked individuals and the third point is based on the overall average score for the two teams.

Whereas some kids become involved in trapshooting after a background in hunting, Oberloh considers the sport to be an fun, life-long activity that can be enjoyed in its own right.

“It’s like any sport, the more you do it, the better you get,” Oberloh said. “It’s just fun as coaches watching the kids do something they enjoy, and they’re having fun. Breaking birds is fun.”

Oberloh also feels that the sport is able to teach participants to overcome negative stereotypes about gun-related activities.

“What’s nice is giving them a positive outlook on guns instead of the negative side of guns,” Oberloh said.

One thing that is vehemently stressed by the club, however, is that care should be taken with how the kids manage the guns at all times.

“I think there are a lot of schools that are kind of weary about it, because it’s guns,” Oberloh said. “We stress that you’re not allowed to bring guns to school, and no ammunition. We do our shooting at 5:30 so they have time to go home and get their weapons. We do stress that highly, that they’re not allowed (in school) and we’re not promoting that in any way.”

The team itself doesn’t receive any funding from the high school, with participants required to pay for their own equipment, including shells and clay targets. The team has been fortunate to receive another of sponsors that have greatly helped it with its necessary costs.

“We’d like to thank our sponsors, they help us out a lot,” Oberloh said. “They pay for probably over half of what our budget is through donations.”

As a high school activity the sport is beneficial for its financial independence, and it also is good for its inclusiveness.

Participants can shoot at a varsity, junior varsity or C-class level, and both boys and girls are welcome. Last year the team had three girls in its ranks.

“When they shoot it’s a non-gender sport,” Oberloh said. “What you shoot is what you shoot.”

There are a number of other high schools in the state that are hoping to get involved with the league eventually (Oberloh says as many as 42 teams were interested in joining this year), and the hope is that one day it will become a sanctioned sport by the Minnesota State High School League.

Until that time, the sport seems to be on a rise that has few limits, and one thing that is for certain is that the Worthington team will go down in history as a major factor in the sport’s youth movement in the state.