The sound of a shotgun followed by the kickback sending clay spreading all around. This fun activity is known as trap shooting, an activity where you typically use a shotgun to shoot at little orange discs that are thrown into the air called clay pigeons.

There are 51,866 students involved with trap in the USA along with 10,316 coaches and 1,795 teams and only 148 teams in Iowa off the SCTP from the DNR and Mount Vernon could be one. Mount Vernon has an Archery team and we should also have a Mount Vernon-Lisbon Trap Team. If we involve Lisbon like we do for other sports in High School we would have more than enough students interested in joining.

I think it would be a good addition to the Mount Vernon and Lisbon extracurricular activities list. Trap shooting could be a fun and successful activity that students enjoy while learning a useful skill and gaining life experiences like good sportsmanship while having fun with peers and classmates just like our Marching Band.

It’s not that hard to start a High School trap shooting team; the Iowa DNR has a program for it. Our Archery team is based on a program called the “National Archery In The Schools”(NASP) program; the DNR has a “Scholastic Clay Target Program” (SCTP) for trap shooting.

To start a team there are 3 minimum requirements: you need at least 5 people for trap and 3 for skeet shooting. I think we have enough people to do that in Mount Vernon alone but we can combine with Lisbon too so we will have plenty of people to start a team.

We need a location to practice at so we could talk to otter creek sportsman club and see if we can use their course which is only 28 minutes away like our golf team uses Kernoustie Golf Club.

We will need certified coaches. We can see if any Lisbon or Mount Vernon teachers want to get certified and if there’s not a lot or none at all we can ask parents. There are already some parents coaching soccer or golf and other sports. I am confident there will be parents willing to get certified.

The cost of the equipment like the shotgun the pigeons the course the ammo the team shirts would all cost quite a bit, but I’ll go back to the Archery team we have sponsors for the archery team and it works well we get quite a bit of money from them so I bet we can get some for our trap team.

We can do what Archery does and not have a JV or Varsity and just have a whole team or we can do it like golf and most of the other sports in the high school and have a JV and Varsity team based on how well you do.