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Carley Snyder takes aim at her target during a tournament organized by the South Carolina Youth Shooting Foundation. Snyder is the top female shooter in S.C.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Bonnie Wyatt, with the Rocky Creek Clay Dusters, aims for victory in competitive sporting clays.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Safety is a top priority at SCYSF competitions. Orange armbands distributed during pre-match briefings allow officials to make sure coaches are always within arm’s reach of each shooter. The young competitors are schooled in firearms safety, but the coach is required to take control of the gun in the case of a misfire.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Donny Roth, vice chairman of the South Carolina Youth Shooting Foundation, wants more young people to take up sporting clays. "It's fun. It's healthy. It's something a family can do," Roth says.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Seventeen-year-old shooter Chandler Gray takes aim.
Photo by Mic Smith
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As coach Rick Wyatt looks on, Snyder, Wyatt and Woelffer use their thumbs to gauge the trajectory of a target before actually firing at the disk. At each station, shooting teams get to see a “show pair” of targets before loading their guns and taking aim.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Clay Dusters coach Rick Wyatt, a member of York Electric Cooperative, reminds his team to focus on the anticipated "break point" of the target. "Shoot where the target is going to be—not where it's at," he says.
Photo by Mic Smith
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After competing in their final tournament, graduating high school seniors Taylor Rienzo, Laken Riddle, Bailey Crenshaw, Lauren Williams, Logan Skrabak and Bradley Turcotte each received a $1,500 scholarship from SCYSF. The S.C. Department of Natural Resources also presented six Harry Hampton Scholarships—two for $1,500, two for $1,000 and two for $500—to the top three male shooters and top three female shooters among college-bound seniors.
Photo by Rick Wyatt
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Maggie Woelffer grins after a successful shooting stage. The 18-year-old high school student likes to compete but enjoys the camaraderie of her teammates almost as much. "We can still be friendly and encourage each other," she says.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Seventeen-year-old Teddy Hutchison is the top male shooter in S.C.
Photo courtesy of the S.C. Youth Shooting Foundation
Ignoring the 40-degree temperature on a drizzly, overcast morning, 16-year-old Bonnie Wyatt steps easily into her shooting stance, leaning forward slightly with the stock of her 12-gauge Beretta shotgun pressed tightly into her right shoulder.
She swings the gun left and right, measuring her field of view, before taking a deep breath. To help her relax, she calls to mind a hymn by Russian composer Pavel Chesnokov—a piece she and her fellow Clover High School Choraliers will perform later that evening. With a calm, determined voice, she calls for her targets.
“Pull!”
Two bright-orange clay disks erupt from behind a bush and arc into the sky on diverging paths. Wyatt tracks the first clay and fires. As the disk explodes into a cloud of dust, the talented young shooter pivots, finds the second target and fires again with the same result. Two clean breaks—an auspicious start to the shooting season for the ladies senior varsity squad of the Rocky Creek Clay Dusters.
Wyatt lowers her still-smoking shotgun and turns her head to flash a dazzling smile at teammates Maggie Woelffer and Carley Snyder.
“Way to go, Bonnie!” Snyder cheers. “Nice job!”
Life lessons
Wyatt, Woelffer and Snyder are among the top shooters in one of South Carolina’s fastest growing teen sports—competitive sporting clays.
Through clubs and tournaments organized by the South Carolina Youth Shooting Foundation (SCYSF), students from the fourth grade and up are developing life skills and learning the values of teamwork and discipline by competing in this challenging variation of traditional skeet and trap shooting, says SCYSF cofounder Donny Roth.
“We want to encourage these kids to learn through a shotgun what it takes to be a great member of society, to become a good adult,” he says.
From humble beginnings in 2007, SCYSF has grown to encompass 150 teams across the state, representing public and private schools, 4-H groups, churches and private gun clubs. Tournaments routinely draw 1,000 or more shooters, family members and spectators.
For the young shooters, sporting clays is like any other sport—a chance to excel at something they love and make friends doing it.
“I enjoy the team atmosphere and the other girls to shoot with. That is really nice about such a competitive sport,” says 18-year-old Woelffer. “We can still be friendly and encourage each other.”
For 17-year-old Chandler Gray, a shooter on the Orangeburg Prep Sporting Clays team, tournaments encourage competitive excellence without the petty rivalries that plague other sports, says his father and coach, Allen “Boo” Gray.
“He likes competing but doesn’t let it go to his head,” he says. “I’m so proud of my son. He’ll go out there and compete against other shooters and then, as soon as the shoot is over, he’ll be hanging around with all of them.”
Golf with a gun
Sporting clays is a variation of trap and skeet shooting in which clay targets are launched from many different directions and locations, offering shooters a greater challenge. While one station might host targets that cross from left to right at more than 40 mph, the next stop could feature a disk that zips across the ground—bouncing crazily over rocks and underbrush.
Courses may cover several hundred acres, prompting enthusiasts to dub their pastime “golf with a gun,” and indeed, most use motorized carts to travel from one shooting station to the next. With as many as 20 different stations on a course, it can take more than two hours to complete a shooting circuit.
The shotgun, of course, is the first order of business for anyone taking up the sport. Competitors may use 12-gauge or 20-gauge shotguns in either double-barrel or single-barrel automatic configurations. A good entry-level shotgun costs about $300, but at tournaments it is not difficult to find shooters using custom shotguns that top $10,000.
Other required gear includes hearing and eye protection. Acceptable ear protection ranges from disposable foam plugs to $1,500, custom-fitted, electronic ear pieces. Shooting glasses, too, range widely in price from just a few dollars to more than $2,000.
Wyatt’s father, Rick, who is also her squad’s coach, is quick to note that expensive equipment is not required to compete successfully.
“A kid with a $200 shotgun, a 25-cent pair of earplugs and a $2 set of glasses is at no disadvantage to a kid who has the whole arsenal,” he says.
Shooting season
The 2013–14 season began in December at Richburg, where Bonnie Wyatt’s eagle-eyed shooting—she broke 89 of 100 targets, a personal best—set the tone and led her squad to a first-place win in the tournament.
A month later, at Live Oaks Shooting Club in Swansea, the team did not fare as well. Winds gusting to 40 mph played havoc with many of the targets, and the team had to settle for a respectable, but disappointing, fourth place. At the next tournament, in Clinton, the girls tied for first in regular competition but were edged out in a shoot-off and ended up taking home the second-place trophy. A month later, at Back Woods Quail Club near Georgetown, the girls faced a series of particularly challenging targets and finished fourth.
By the time the state championship returned to Richburg in May, coach Rick Wyatt was worried that his team would be at a disadvantage since the girls’ busy schedules had kept them from practicing as a group. Individually, however, each girl had put in time at the range.
More than 400 shooters would compete that day, collectively firing more than 43,000 shells in their pursuit of trophies, medals, scholarships and personal bests.
At the last station of the day, a challenging 10-target round, scorekeeper Gene Stewart watches carefully as Snyder takes her turn—a miss and nine hits. Then Woelffer steps up to the station and breaks seven out of 10 clays. And, finally, Wyatt moves into position, calls for the targets, and breaks all 10.
When the scores are totaled for the day, Woelffer has broken 70 clays, Wyatt has hit 79 and Snyder has shattered 92 out of 100 targets—enough to make her the top female shooter of the championship tournament.
As a light morning breeze sweeps away the last of the gun smoke, Stewart nods his approval.
“That was nice shooting, young ladies,” he says. “Very nice shooting indeed.”
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Get More
Learn more about competitive sporting clays and find a team near you at scysf.org.
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Hot shots
Teddy Hutchison
A couple of years ago, Rock Hill High School junior Teddy Hutchison gave up basketball and track so he could concentrate on perfecting his skills at sporting clays.
That concentration paid off when he beat more than 400 other shooters in all division—breaking 98 out of 100 clay targets—to take top honors at the SCYSF State Championship.
Coach Hill Muse says the young man has “a knack for understanding the game,” adding that Hutchison’s average score over the 2013–14 season never dropped below 90.
Hutchison says the secret to his success is pretty simple: lots of practice. He hits the shooting range once a week with his Browning 625, often focusing on one specific scenario until he is able to break the clay five consecutive times before moving on to the next station.
“It takes a lot of time and focus,” says the 17-year-old champion, who has been active in the sport since the fourth grade. “When I am shooting, the only things that matter are the targets that fly in front of me.”
Carley Snyder
Breaking 92 of 100 clays at the state championship earned 17-year-old Carley Snyder the title of top female SCYSF shooter for the 2013–14 season.
“It was just awesome,” she says. “I beat my personal best by nine targets.”
Competitive by nature, the senior at Andrew Jackson High School in Kershaw also has been active in horse barrel racing and golf.
“She was good at golf but was never really interested enough to become competitive,” says Larry Snyder, Carley’s father. “I could see that sporting clays was something she really enjoyed. I think it is a combination of the competitiveness of the sport and the fact that she can measure her improvement.”
And improve she did. Last year, Snyder shot in the low 60s. But after switching to a better fitting gun, enlisting the help of shooting instructors and logging hours of practice on the range, her scores sharply improved.
“I’m also a lot more patient than I used to be,” she says. “Before, when I missed a target, I would get really upset, and I would keep missing them, because I could not calm down enough to recover. Now, if I miss one, I can block it out, see what I did wrong and apply it to the next target.”
Snyder says she’ll be back with her team for another season before graduating high school and heading off to college. The new champion says she eventually plans to become a conservation biologist and—no surprises here—a sporting clays shooting instructor.