A meadowlark’s song graces the air in the prairie just north of Baker City, but Zack Kimball can’t hear the bird’s call.

He shields his eyes behind the blue sheen of polarized lenses.

He holds his breath and yells, “Pull!”

With a snap, his spinning target flies out overhead, as high as the power lines, orange and rising.

Kimball’s eyes and hands track the target, the barrel of his shotgun swings and at the squeeze of the trigger the target disintegrates, its pieces flying away like a firework against a dark sky.

Kimball smiles, pops the break on his shotgun and reloads.

This is his third year serving as a coach for the Baker School District’s trapshooting team. Three days a week he helps the athletes hone their skills at practices in preparation for competitions.

The team started in 2020, the first year of the pandemic.

As luck had it, maintaining a safe distance is a principal of a sport involving rapidly firing shotguns.

About 15 students signed up for the first year of competition.

Eleven stayed on from the first year and, together with assistant coach Wayne Paxton, 10 students competed at the Oregon state tournament in 2021.

Riley Hurliman, an eighth grader and team captain, was state champion in the novice division and third in the JV division.

This spring, coach Zack Kimball’s squad, totaling about 30 students, has been annihilating clay targets for the past month or so despite air cold enough to cramp a trigger finger during evening practices at the Baker Trap Club, just east of Highway 30 about a mile north of town.

“I just saw it at the school and I thought it looked interesting,” said Ethan Morgan, a three-year team member and current captain.

On bad weather days, students study techniques for taking out right and left angle targets, and other subjects.

Students clean and prep the Trap Club for the next session, stock the targets and wire up the clay pigeon-throwing machine. It resembles the rotating chambers of a revolver, and stacks hundreds of the clay disks in its racks.

Kimball is excited about how rapidly the team members have progressed.

Kimball said a grant from the National Rifle Association supplied clay pigeons as well as five shotguns that team members can use.

“It took about 15 hours to write out an NRA grant,” Kimball said. “They really pulled through.”

On the firing line

During practices, students one at a time call “pull!” and the machine whips the clay pigeon out to the range with an intentionally random skew.

Most of them don’t touch the ground intact.

“They’re gonna shoot about 20,000 clay targets,” Kimball said, talking about the entire 2022 season.

At competitions, athletes generally shoot 25 targets for each of two days, for a total of 50.

During the Shamrock Shoot event on March 12 at La Grande, Hurliman placed first in the JV division, and Paxton, the assistant coach, was first in the coaches division.

Both Kimball and Paxton are competitive trap shooters.

On Wednesday, May 4, Baker’s team will travel to La Grande for one of the larger trapshooting competitions in the state.

Oregon state’s tournament is set for June 25-26 at Hillsboro, with as many as 600 competitors expected. The national competition is July 6-10 in Michigan, with more than 3,000 students competing.

The sport has demanding prerequisites — eye and ear protection to start, and all firearms are inspected before competition and must meet competitive minimums.

Baker team members are waiting on their first official team gear, arriving hopefully before they attend the meet in La Grande, on special order by designer Jason Ritter.

The Baker trapshooting team will host an open event on May 22, starting at 7:30 a.m. at the Trap Club, to raise money for expenses to travel to the state tournament.

For more information, or if you’re interested in joining the team, call Kimball at 541-910-8446.

These students have been competing for the team: Jose Arment, Remington Benson, Anthony Betts, Liam Blair, Sawyer Blatchford, Gauge Bloomer, Charlie Boulter, Ryan Brown, Cameron Conklin, Mason Downing, Alsitie Elizondo, Cody Eskew, Jaxon Ford, Ryan Hansen, Gage Hatfield, Jack Heriza, Seth Holden, Riley Hurliman, Alex Jaca, Connor Martin, Ethan Morgan, Sam Nelson, Connor Norton, Matt Rabourne, Cris Schuh, Keegan Slobig, Skye Smith, Jimmy Sullivan, Ethan Whiting, Alex Wise, Joe Zikmund