Hermantown students form clay target shooting club

On the firing line at the Proctor Gun Club, shotguns sounded off at irregular intervals. If you were wearing ear protection — and you should have been — the shots sounded like the last few kernels exploding in a batch of popcorn.

By: Sam Cook, Duluth News Tribune

May 1, 2011

On the firing line at the Proctor Gun Club, shotguns sounded off at irregular intervals. If you were wearing ear protection — and you should have been — the shots sounded like the last few kernels exploding in a batch of popcorn.

But the people firing these shotguns on a recent afternoon were not the usual crowd of middle-aged men who typically do trapshooting here. They were Hermantown High School students who are members of the first high school trapshooting team in the area.

Sophomore Ryan Johnson worked hard for a year toward getting a clay target team at Hermantown High School. After his presentation before the School Board on March 14, with the support of other students and several community members, the board approved the club team on a 5-0 vote.

“I was the happiest kid in the world,” Johnson said.

Now there are 33 happy members of this club team, including boys and girls. They practice on Mondays and Wednesdays at the Proctor Gun Club, and they’ll begin competition this week with 28 other teams in the Minnesota State High School Clay Target League.

They’ve received plenty of support. The gun club offers special rates for young shooters. Dave Gilberg of Gilberg’s Firearms provides shells to the students at his cost. And the Izaak Walton League’s Duluth chapter has donated $300 to the team.

As a club sport, the team receives no money from the school district. It competes representing Hermantown High School, but students cannot earn a varsity letter.

At the gun club on this cool April afternoon, groups of five shooters toed the 16-yard line and, one at a time, fired away at moving clay targets. The students shot 25 targets at a time, and two sets of 25 constituted a full round.

“It’s a lot more mental than you think it is,” said Courtney Collins, a Hermantown sophomore and team member who hunts pheasants, grouse and deer.

Her best score so far is 18 of 25.

Some of the team members had never shot a gun before, said head coach Guy LeBlanc, a math teacher at the high school. But they’ve found a place on the team.

“Some of these kids are in other sports,” LeBlanc said. “But for most of them, this is their thing. It gives them a niche.”

In trapshooting, competitors stand 16 yards away from a trap house, from which a machine fires out 5-inch clay discs. They might go slightly left, straight away, or slightly right. When a shooter is ready, he or she calls, “Pull!” The call activates the trap machine, and a clay target goes flying. A shooter must react quickly and gets just one shot to break the target.

“It’s all anticipation,” said Hermantown junior Nathan Gustavsson. “You close the action (on the shotgun). You say, ‘Pull!’ There’s a moment of time when nothing happens. Then you see the target go up. There’s a little bit of adrenaline. You pull the trigger. You see it explode. That’s when the magic happens.”

The feedback on a shot is immediate. Some of the targets, hit well, appear to explode into dust. Some shatter. Some barely splinter. Some sail away untouched.

Assistant coach Lana Arro, a Hermantown math teacher, sits in a chair scoring the students. She likes what she’s seeing in the young shooters.

“This is cool,” Arro said.

Several members of the Proctor Gun Club were on hand to assist or advise the shooters. Those volunteers think the team is cool, too.

“This is the best thing that could happen to these kids,” said club president Bob Smith of Twig. “It gets them into the shooting sports. And this is our next generation of sportsmen and trapshooters.”

Club vice president George Pappas of Island Lake helped Johnson get the club team started.

“I’d like to see not only Hermantown but Proctor and some of the Duluth schools form teams,” Pappas said.

Hermantown’s closest trapshooting competitors are at schools in McGregor and Kelliher. Competition is virtual. When the season begins in May, teams will shoot once a week at their own clubs, sending their scores to the Minnesota State High School Clay Target League’s website.

But the teams that advance to the state tournament June 11-12 in the Twin Cities will shoot head-to-head at the same shooting range.

A good score for a high school shooter is 40 to 45 out of 50, Johnson said.

“There’s some real potential here,” Pappas said. “I foresee some of these kids going a long way if they work at it.”

On the firing line in a chilly April wind, the shooters came and went as their schedules allowed. They stepped to the line and shouts of “Pull!” rang out, followed by the reports of shotguns. The sweet smell of spent gunpowder drifted on the breeze.