JONESBORO — James Wray pointed his 12-gauge shotgun at the Harrisburg trapshooting range and spoke into a voice-activated machine that would send the orange clay target skyward.
“Pull,” he said.
The disc shot out from a launch inside a bunker about 30 yards from where Wray stood.
Within a second of the target’s launch, Wray pulled the trigger.
A mass of pellets blasted from the shotgun; the shattered disc fell to the ground, already littered with remnants of other targets.
It was one of a few hundred shots Wray would make during the Arkansas State University Red Wolves Shootout, a trapshooting tournament sponsored by ASU in early November. Along with ASU, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the University of the Ozarks, Ecclesia College of Springdale and the University of Arkansas Community College at Hope competed in the shootout.
Wray’s ASU five-memberteam - called the Red Squad - won the two-day tournament. UA finished second.
Wray’s childhood friend, Mason Young of Payneway, is a member of the UA trapshooting team.
“We competed against each other for a long time,” Wray said. “We wanted to beat each other, and that helped us get good.”
This summer, ASU competed in the national collegiate championship tournament in Sparta, Ill., and finished third. The team also finished third in a trapshooting tournament hosted by Mississippi State University in April.
It’s not bad for a team that first formed in February, that gets teased for its less-thantop-of-the-line weaponry and whose sponsor pulled a shotgun trigger for the first time in October 2011.
“These kids have talent,” said faculty sponsor Gauri Guha, an associate professor of environmental economics. “In a short period of time they’ve come a long way.”
Harrisburg trapshooter Pat Turnage and Arkansas Game and Fish Commission representative Chuck Woodson first approached ASU with the idea of developing a trapshooting program two years ago.
Scores of Arkansas high schools have offered trapshooting as an extracurricular activity for the past five years under its Arkansas Youth Shooting Sports Program, and now about 80 high schools across the state offer trapshooting programs.
But few colleges have fielded sport shooting teams.
The sport was developed in England in the 19th century, when marksmen shot at live pigeons released from traps. The pigeons have since been replaced with the discs, or “clay pigeons,” but the word “trap” remains.
Although sometimes mistaken for each other, there is a difference between trapshooting and skeet-shooting.
In trapshooting, targets are launched from “houses” in front of the shooter. The targets fly away from the shooter at a given speed.
In skeet-shooting, targets cross in midair and are launched from “houses” at the shooter’s right and left.
“This is new in universities in Arkansas,” said Renae Chambless of Lonoke, the southwest regional director for the Academics, Integrity, Marksmanship program - a youth program of the Amateur Trapshooting Association.
“It’s fun to watch how it’s developing here,” she said of trapshooting.
About the time eight ASU students were beginning to form the basis for their trapshooting team in October 2011, Guha aimed a shotgun at a clay target for the first time and pulled the trigger.
The disc exploded.
“I was so excited,” Guha said of his first hit. “You want to do it again and again.”
Guha, who has taught at ASU for 11 years, said he took up shooting because he was “bored” after his daughter left their Jonesboro home to go to college.
He hit eight targets out of 25 on his first round.
He was hooked.
Meanwhile, the team elected Wray, an ASU senior from Payneway who shot traps while attending Ridgefield Christian School in Jonesboro, as its vice president. When the president resigned, Wray stepped in to lead.
The team now has 25 members who compete to be named onto the two five-member tournament squads. Two were women, although one quit and another broke a rib and does not shoot now.
Guha left Jonesboro to teach in France for a month and whenhe returned in February, he helped the members file as an ASU student organization.
“They had no direction,” Guha said. “They were practicing, but they were not organized.”
In March, the team began weekly practices in Harrisburg.
Turnage, who runs the trapshooting club in Harrisburg, became their coach.
Four weeks later, the club traveled to Starkville, Miss., for its first tournament.
The team finished third.
“They had shot together as a squad for less then a month, and they did so well,” Guha said.
Because it is considered a “club sport” at ASU, not an NCAA sport, members of the team pay for their own shotguns, shells and targets.
It’s costly. A good shotgun - a Browning XT, a Beretta or a Caesar Guerini - can cost up to $2,000. A premium shotgun may go for $18,000. A box of 50 shells cost about $45, and 50 traps cost about $15.
Members estimate they spend about $2,500 a year to practice.
Guha said other college’s teams have poked fun at ASU squad members’ relatively cheap weapons. While other college shooters use shotguns that cost thousands of dollars, some ASU squad members use weapons that cost as little as about $500.
“The people at the competition laugh at us,” he said. “Here we are doing it all onour own.”
ASU did provide a stipend for travel when the team went to Sparta, Ill.
“We’re looking closely at ‘club sports,’” ASU Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs William Stripling said. “We want to see how they fit into the mission of the university. The [trapshooting] club gives a different level of recognition to ASU.
“The nationals took ASU’s name across the country,” he said.
Turnage downplays his role for ASU’s success, though others said he is the best trapshooting coach in the state.
“If you can point at something, you can shoot traps, “Turnage said. “You get in your stance, hold your gun and look for the target. The basic fundamentals are 90 percent of this.”
It’s much harder than Turnage makes it out to be, squad members said.
The 4-and-5/16th-inch discs shoot out of the “trap house” launch at 42 mph. Their trajectory can range 17 degrees on either side of a center line; the shooter does not know where the disc is headed.
The pellets inside a fired shotgun shell travel about 1,290 feet per second. Shooters have about one or two seconds to fire before the disc begins falling to the ground.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 11/24/2012