Browning shoots her way into European competitive tour

WOOSTER - Kayle Browning has shot her way into a competition tour of Europe in 2009. That's fine, but she's really hoping for a return three years later.

That would be 2012 and to London and to the Olympic Games trapshooting competition.

Browning is just 16 and a junior at Greenbrier High School. She is already a veteran in shotgun shooting events and was chosen at age 13 for a session at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Last spring, she led her Greenbrier trapshooting team to a third place finish in the Arkansas Youth Shooting Sports championships at Remington Gun Club near Lonoke. This statewide shooting program is a project of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, administered by its Education and Outreach Division and with Chuck Woodson in charge.

More recently she competed in the USA Shooting championships at San Antonio and took first place in the women's junior division. This earned her a spot on the 12-shooter team that will go to the world championships in August at Maribor, Slovenia. Coupled with that will be a shooting competition visit to Germany, Italy and Great Britain over a three-week period.

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That USA team of 12 is in four divisions - men, women, junior men and junior women. The 12 who made the team at the San Antonio event included seven shooters who were in the 2008 Olympics at Beijing, China.

Browning said, "I was third in the qualifying round at San Antonio, then I came in first in the finals." That last round was close. Browning broke 23 of 25 targets and won by a single target over runner-up Mollie Bender of Montoursville, Pa., and by two targets over Brandi Hobbs of Edinboro, Pa. The total scores were Browning 247, Bender 246 and Hobbs 245.

Browning and Hobbs are 16 years old. Bender is 19, with 21 the age cut-off for juniors. In addition, Browning missed by one place making the women's USA team.

The Olympics won't come easily for Browning. Not only does she have to beat out stiff competition in this country, the American team has to compete for one of 19 Olympic slots out of about 200 nations competing in trapshooting.

All this comes with maintaining good grades at Greenbrier High and with holding down a spot on the Lady Panther basketball team. Browning started many of last year's games for Greenbrier and is counted on as a key in this season's basketball at her school.

She said, "I shoot every day. I have to get up at 6 a.m. to do make-up work for classes and for basketball. The teachers and coaches have been good to work with me"

Browning started working with shotguns at an early age under the tutelage of her father, Tommy Browning. He's a five-time national champion in sporting clays - a different game from trap but with many of the basics of gun handling and aiming.

"Trapshooting is 98 percent mental," Kayle Browning said. "When you are shooting, your focus is huge, just huge. You call for a target, and you have three-tenths of a second before it comes out."

The world competition in trapshooting is markedly different from the more common trapshooting in Arkansas and across the nation.

In regular trap, targets come out of a single throwing station or house at varying angles and travel about 40 miles an hour. In international trap, often called bunker trap, the targets come from one of 15 different stations and are thrown at speeds from 60 to 80 miles an hour, Tommy Browning explained.

Kayle works with a Krieghoff trap gun, a 12-gauge over and under with a 30-inch barrel. It weighs 10 pounds, and she said, "Lifting weights in basketball helps me with the shooting too. In these competitions, you are shooting 250 rounds over about 10 hours."

Along with her father, Kayle is working with veteran trap coach Brett Erickson. She doesn't hesitate to tell her goal in trapshooting. "I want to make the (London) Olympics."

(Log Cabin outdoor writer Joe Mosby can be contacted by e-mail at jhmosby@cyberback.com.)