Jan 23, 2016 4 min read

Tristan Cole has grown a bit since he and his father, Dave, traveled to the Smoking Gun Plantation in Georgia for a taping of the Brotherhood Outdoors show on the Sportsman’s Channel.

But the 14-year-old eighth grader from Waynesburg can’t wait to see the episode the two taped with hosts Daniel Lee Martin and Julie McQueen last March.

“I laughed the whole time when I was watching the trailer,” said Tristan Cole.

The Coles didn’t expect their episode to make the popular show until the second half of this year, but it was bumped up to this week. It will air for the first time at 3 p.m. Tuesday and again at the same time Thursday. It also will be shown at 11:30 p.m. Friday, with a final airing at 11 a.m. next Sunday.

The Sportsman’s Channel is on 153 for area Comcast customers.

Dave Cole, who works for People’s Natural Gas Distributing, said he got the idea to apply to go on the show while he and Tristan were attending one of the many sporting clays shoots in which they take part.

“The Union Sportsmen’s Alliance does several shoots around the country and we go when they’re close,” said Dave Cole. “They were looking for a father and son to go, and I applied for it and they picked us.”

There was one problem.

Dave Cole had hip replacement surgery last January, so going on a two-day quail hunt about six weeks later was an issue.

“I still had a little bit of a limp,” said Dave Cole. “You’ll see that when you watch the show. But they had good dogs and good handlers. That made things a lot easier.”

The Coles are ardent sporting clays shooters at Hunting Hills in Dilliner and also have hunted pheasant. A quail hunt was something new for them since there isn’t much of a quail population remaining in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

But they quickly took to it.

“We would go out in the morning and hunt, then break for lunch,” said Dave Cole. “Then, we would go back out in the afternoon. In the two days, we got around 200 birds.”

That was a combined total among the two Coles and Martin and McQueen, but it was still a nice hunt.

“I had gone pheasant hunting, but the quail just blew that right out of the water,” said Tristan Cole, who also is active in 4-H. “We might even try to go and do something like that again.”

Tristan Cole began going to sporting clays shoots on Sundays with his dad when he was six or seven. He joined the Hunting Hills Hawkeyes about four years ago and has excelled, winning state championships in his division the past three years and finishing fifth in his class the one year he attended the national shoot.

“It’s just great to be able to share a love for shooting with my son,” Dave Cole said. “That’s something I’ll always remember about this hunt, just me and my son getting to go together.”

• The showdown between Frazier-Simplex and the Dormont-Mt. Lebanon Sportsmen’s Club in the Pittsburgh and Suburban Rifle League was postponed last week and moved to Jan. 27.

The two Washington County-based teams are tied for the league lead at 8-1, with Dormont-Mt. Lebanon having won the first of their three meetings earlier this season.

• With just a couple of weeks remaining in the regular season, Waynesburg leads Section 1 in the WPIAL rifle standings with a 3-0 record. The Raiders are 3-4 overall. McGuffey is second at 2-1, 4-2, with the top two teams set to advance to the WPIAL team tournament Feb. 9 at the Dormont-Mt. Lebanon Sportsmen’s Club.

Still in the running in Section 1 are Avella and Washington, each at 2-2 in the section.

Section 2 has the two teams to beat: Mt. Lebanon (4-0, 8-0) and Woodland Hills (4-0, 7-0). How tough is Section 2 this year?

Trinity is 1-5 in Section 2 shoots, but 5-5 overall.

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