Trap: Secret weapons and huge successes

By Grace Herburger

Photo sent in by Emily Ferguson

Our varsity trap team hit the mark this past season, getting the highest scores for a varsity ladies team in the district, region, state and even the nation this past July. We’re super proud of them, but most of us don’t even fully know what the trap team entails. So what does the trap team do, and why are SMS girls so great at it?

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In light of the news that the St. Mary’s trap team were the highest scoring all-girls team at nationals this summer, many students are realizing that they know nothing about the sport besides the fact that the Turkeys are good at it. Trap is a year-round sport that practices twice per week starting in November: once on Monday afternoons at Shelby farms and on Saturdays at the Memphis Sports Shooting Association (MSSA) in Lakeland. They practice in assigned squads of five members at their set times, and they are coached by five dads and grandfathers of SMS students and alumnae. Emily Ferguson (11) said, “I wholeheartedly believe that our coaches are our secret weapon.”

Tournaments occasionally take the place of their regular Saturday morning practices, but they follow the same practice protocol of showing up in squads of five. Each girl shoots 100 clay birds at a tournament and is scored based on the number of targets she hits.

While the majority of their tournaments occur during the school year, nationals is a week long tournament in the middle of summer. This year, the St. Mary’s girls shot on July 20 and 21, the last two days of the tournament located in Columbus, Ohio at the Cardinal Shooting Center. Instead of the 100 targets they shoot in a regular tournament, the team members shoot 200 at nationals. The top varsity ladies team was the Turkeys, with their top five varsity scores adding up to 899/1000! Emily Ferguson shot a personal best of 195.

​Ferguson said, “St. Mary’s is very good at trap considering most of the girls starting out have never picked up a gun before.” A team comprised mostly of beginners beat schools like FACS, Houston, Collierville, and St. Agnes last year, and the successes of trap this last season will hopefully carry into the 2018-19 season.