Shooters aim to improve Lobo baseball
Saturday event at the Albuquerque Trap Club to raise money for the UNM program
Finding creative ways to raise money for sports programs is not always the easiest thing to do. Bake sales or golf tournaments are the usual, go-to fundraisers. But the University of New Mexico baseball program has something new on tap for its supporters.
On Saturday, teams of marksmen will take aim in a trap-shooting competition, with the goal to raise money to feed Lobos baseball players.
“I run around with a bunch of people who don’t think inside the box,” UNM coach Ray Birmingham said. “These people are smart and they’re objective. The only way this athletic department functions well is by raising money.”
The objective was to reach a new segment of society and get them excited about Lobos sports, he said.
“We have to keep reaching out to the people of New Mexico,” Birmingham said. “This ain’t my baseball team, it’s the community baseball team. We’re just running it for you.”
Lobos supporter Rocky Hughes, who is helping organize the event at the Albuquerque Trap Club, said the fiveman teams will each fire 25 shots at each of the different stations, and the team with the most hits on the clay pigeons will receive UNM baseball jackets and trophies.
“It should be a lot of fun,” Hughes said. “I don’t think anybody is doing anything like this. It’s something unique. We’re kind of doing a small one to start with. I’ve run a lot of different things, but never a trap shooting event.”
Officials with the Trap Club will go through safety procedures and check all the contestants’ guns, he said.
“We’ve talked about doing this for three years, and we were finally able to make it happen,” Hughes said.
In some ways, the event makes perfect sense, said former Lobos pitcher Kevin Letz.
“The state of New Mexico is one of the premier quail-hunting spots in the country, if not the world,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of folks who like to shoot shotguns and go hunting. With that in mind, we tapped into that to come up with a different kind of event.”
This is the first in what may be a series of atypical fundraising events, Birmingham said. For instance, a bowling tournament would be a good event, he said, adding in jest perhaps a pump-jack riding contest.
“We used to do that when I was younger,’ said Birmingham, whose roots are in southeastern New Mexico, where oil fields abound. “You grab a hold of the nose of the smaller pump jack and hold on, it shoots up in the air. But, seriously, we want do one of those (corn-hole) tournaments and a home run derby contest.”