Typical high school sports that come to mind are generally football, track and field, cross country, soccer, baseball, basketball, and, depending on the region, perhaps wrestling, field hockey, and lacrosse. But the fastest-growing sport in America isn’t any of those: it’s trap shooting, and the student sportsmen competing in it are helping preserve the Second Amendment.
The success and growth of trap shooting is a major change of pace for the sport, which was on the verge of dying out as a competitive sport, particularly at the team level, all but a few years ago. But then teachers, coaches, and sportsmen around the nation decided to start reviving the sport and getting students involved.
Speaking to Fox News Digitial, a high school teacher in the town of Newport, Washington, Mr. David Bradbury, recounted being told by a sportsmen’s club member that shooting was dying out among young people, particularly sport shooting. “‘If we don’t do something to get the younger generation involved and younger families involved, our club and our shooting sports around here, they’re going to die,‘” Mr. Bradbury says the sportsman told him.
But instead of stewing in despair, Mr. Bradbury decided to get involved and try to revive sport shooting. So he worked with the town of Newport and another town to create a high school trap team, starting with just ten students between the two towns. But now they have 35 students competing.
Describing how it’s going and how they brought it back, Mr. Bradbury said, “It’s largely a grassroots effort for folks in a generation similar to mine who grew up experiencing and enjoying certain things that in today’s environment are becoming more and more restrictive. If there’s not a proactive effort to embrace and encourage and reestablish so many of these awesome things, they’ll dwindle away.”
And, unsurprisingly, the kids participating are loving it. Eric Thompson, a father of trap shooters, speaking to Fox News Digital about the sport and how it’s great because kids get to participate instead of just riding the bench as the coach’s favorites get put in, said, “So many times you find kids that are on sports teams that spend all the time sitting on the bench. Here, there is no second-string. Everybody shoots, everybody competes, everybody has the same chances.”
One of his sons, Roland, commented on how training for the sport has helped him in other areas of life, saying, “It’s a lot about focus and I think it shapes how hard I work. That dedication, I think that’s definitely branched out from just shooting into life, working hard and getting it done.”
So, while the sport is still small, it’s growing. And with young people and their families involved, it’s far less at risk of dying out than if people like Mr. Bradbury had done nothing to try to revive it when they saw the dire straights that sport shooting was in.
Featured image credit: By Tim Hipps, U.S. Army – http://www.defenseimagery.mil/imagery.html#guid=0efd118125da5c585fa8b77477eb298689f23641 This image was released by the United States Army with the ID 080812-A-0000H-004 (next).
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