Jul 11, 2015 3 min read

As I was perusing the Internet this past week, a story caught my eye.

It was titled, “U.S. High Schools Embrace Shooting as Hot New Sport.”

The story, a Bloomsberg News Service feature, centered on the Minnesota State High School Clay Target League championship, the world’s biggest shooting-sport event.

According to the story, in 2009, the first year the contest was held, 30 shooters competed. This year, it had 5,134 competitors and drew 20,000 spectators.

Trap shooting is the fastest-growing sport in Minnesota and schools have begun offering it as a competitive sport in Wisconsin and North Dakota.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates that the average 16-year-old competitor in the event will spend approximately $75,000 on trap shooting over the course of their lifetime. Hence, the Minnesota trap leagues are drawing big sponsoreship money from gunmakers such as Benelli and SKB. Retailers such as Cabella’s are also chipping in to help the sport.

Reading the story, it made me wonder if such a league would work in Pennsylvania. Locally, we obviously have many hunters and nearly all, if not all, local outdoors clubs offer trap or skeet shooting. Several clubs also offer youth shotgun shooting leagues.

We also have six local high schools in Washington and Greene counties that offer competitive rifle shooting as a WPIAL-sanctioned sport.

And the number of teams that offer rifle as a competitive sport continues to grow.

Certainly guns make some people nervous. And guns and kids really make some people nervous. And that’s fine.

But the fact is, the students who participate in shooting sports are far less likely to have some kind of gun-related accident than those who aren’t actively involved.

Don’t think that’s the case? Look back over the past decade or two and show me the cases of accidental shootings involving our local rifle teams?

Don’t bother. The number is zero.

Why? Because the students involved in the shooting sports not only learn gun safety first, they learn a healthy respect for the equipment and the damage it can cause.

A number of colleges also offer competitive skeet shooting as well, including Duke, Yale and Purdue.

The area already sends a number of shooters each year to college with rifle scholarships – perhaps more than any other NCAA Division I sport – why not competitive skeet shooting as well?

It’s just going to take the right individual to organize the creation of such a league locally.

• Zach Nicolella finished fifth overall and Mackenzie Wagner sixth at the National 4-H smallbore rifle 3-position championships recently.

That information was incorrect in last week’s Observer-Reporter.

Outdoors Editor F. Dale Lolley can be reached at dlolley@observer-reporter.com