‘Oh, I hit that’: Kids loaded for rodeo
The first time Georgie Seagraves tried to shoot a gun, she blasted a hole in the floor right in front of her coach.
The gun was too big for her, and her finger had been on the trigger — a mistake. Her coach, a champion skeet shooter, looked at the hole, looked at her and said,
“You handled that well.”
A year later, Seagraves, 16, is skeet shooting at the Houston Rodeo and Livestock Show Young Gun Skeet Shoot, a two-day event that wrapped up Saturday with skeet and clay shooting options at the Greater Houston Sports Club.
“There’s an adrenaline rush to shooting,” she said. “It’s instantly gratifying — you break that clay and you’re like, ‘Oh, I hit that.’”
Skeet shooters aimed at moving targets (the “bird”) launched at high speed across a long field at the sports club. Sporting clays took place in the woods behind the skeet range. Shooters liken sporting clays to golf: It’s a course with multiple stations meant to come as close as possible to reallife hunting.
Competitors and families
crowded the range. Some brought lawn chairs, others used golf cars. Seagraves’ dad joked that they were all just her accessories.
Although Seagraves grew up a military kid and saw her dad shoot, she didn’t pick up a gun until she got a flier at her high school in Dripping Springs. But she’s always liked individual sports.
Because Dripping Springs is official “Wedding Capital of Texas,” the team practices in a wedding venue: A barn.
One of her friends, 16-year-old Colton Roark form Carrizo Springs, wandered over to where she was waiting by the range for another friend to finish. They’d met on the shooting circuit; Roark had gotten into shooting four years ago because he loved dove hunting. One of their other friends, he told Seagraves, had just missed a bird, and gotten mad.
Then the friend missed a second.
“It’s super mental,” Seagraves said. “You shoot with your subconscious.”
Her coach compares it to basketball players sinking free throws. They don’t measure the ground between themselves and the net; they feel it. If a shooter tries to measure the distance, she’ll miss.
Brian Fiolek, 14, thinks he’s gotten much better at focusing over the past year. He’s been shooting since he was 8, following his elder sister (she’s now at Texas A&M).
“He wants to be her,” said his mother, Ann Fiolek, 51. Brian nodded. The family had driven in from Crockett for the event.
Brian practices two or four or sometimes five times a week. He’s trying to improve how he moves his body on the range.
He’s happiest when he wins. “You don’t notice anything besides what you’re working on,” he said. “It’s just you.”
His mother is happy to keep carting him around to meets, as long as the sport makes him happy. She likes it because it’s a good family event. At other shoots, she said, there’s a parents-versus-kids event at the end.
“The kids always beat us,” she said. “It’s a rarity that we ever beat them.”
Brian looked sideways at his mother through his purple protective glasses.
“You never beat me,” he said.