 “Pull!”Two white discs zip into the air from
different directions. They hover for about a second before the gunman blasts them to
smithereens.
“Those are the hardest
kind,” he says.
It didn’t look too hard. Of
course, when you’re watching a statewide skeet and trap shooting champion, the game
looks effortless. He tracks the discs with his eye, easily smashing each one with a single
shot, one after another.
Not bad for a 16 year old.
Josh Goodnight, a rising junior at
West Rowan High School, has been shooting guns since he was 3. He still has his first gun,
a 410 double barrel Fox. “I’ve had it supposedly since I was born,” he
laughs. Sixteen years and eight championships later, he’s working his way up the
ladder to what he hopes will be Olympic fame.
In the past two years, Josh has
won four high school Hunter Safety tournaments, three junior skeet championships, a state
championship hunter safety championship which qualified him for the national hunter safety
tournament this July and, recently, the Norris Goodbey registered skeet tournament. This
week, he’s competing in Richmond, Va., at the Great Eastern skeet tournament, vying
for first place out of almost 250 competitors.
The growing win list isn’t
going to his head, though. To Josh, everything is simply another step closer to his dream,
to be part of the United States Olympic shooting team in 2004. Right now, he’s got
two short term goals on his mind, winning the Junior World Tournament in Atlanta this July
and shooting a four by four this year (that’s 400 hits out of 400 shots in a single
tournament. . . a difficult feat even for the most seasoned shooters).
Skeet, trap and sporting clay
shooting all involve firing a shotgun at a moving clay target, the difference lies in the
direction the clays are launched from. Trap clays are launched directly ahead, while
skeets are launched from three separate angles as the shooter moves to different stations
on a semicircle. The most difficult are doubles, which are launched from different
directions and cross in front of the shooter.
A trap round consists of 20 shots,
a skeet round is 25. In skeet shooting, two or three shots are fired from a given station.
The skill comes in sighting the moving target and anticipating its position when the
shotgun is fired. Men, women and children enjoy the sport, and there are competitions for
all ages.
Getting to the Olympics is a long
and challenging process. Points are earned through registered competitions, and the
accumulated points go towards qualifying the shooter.
Josh has been shooting skeets and
traps for eight years. Does he ever get nervous? Not a chance. “My first tournament,
I was pretty nervous. Now I’m pretty calm,” he says. “I don’t think
about it, I just get up there and do it.”
And he does it well. He says he
loves the competition, and that’s what draws him to the game. Every face-off is an
opportunity to learn. “I just like getting to meet new people, seeing what
they’re good at and what I can work on to improve,” he says.
Alan McKinney, who heads up the
Hunter Safety team at West Rowan, says Josh definitely stands out as a shooter. McKinney
says that one of the first things he noticed about Josh was his calmness. “He’s
got a quiet self-confidence about him,” says McKinney. “He’s easy going,
he’s not easily upset or frustrated … he just doesn’t let anything get an
upper hand on him.”
McKinney believes that Josh’s
easy going attitude is the main thing that keeps him on top of his game. “In a
shooting tournament, there’s a pressure there that the observer doesn’t see
… anything could go wrong,” says McKinney. “He just takes it like a walk in
the park. He’s certainly a very down- to-earth kind of young man.”
Josh says he owes a lot to his two
biggest supporters, Jimmy Goodnight, his father, and Joe Early, whom he works for at the
Rowan County Wildlife Association, a private gun club on Majolica Road. “They’ve
put in a lot of time and money to get me the way I am.”
Early says that Josh stands out
not only because he is a very determined athlete, but also because he’s such a good
person. “He’s a rare kid,” says Early. “Josh is well-mannered,
he’s mature, he’s a good listener; I can leave him here alone at the range and
not worry … and he’s just 16 years old.”
Early is also confident that Josh
will be an Olympian one day, as much practice as he gets. Josh tries to get in a couple of
rounds as often as he can, usually at least three times a week when he’s working at
the shooting range. And shooting always comes first. “I’ll drop everything to
shoot,” Josh says.
Even schoolwork?
“No sir,” he laughs. His
parents let him know early on that school comes first. “When the grades go down, the
guns go,” he says with a smile.
And just what kinds of grades does
a champion deadeye make? He humbly admits that most of them are A’s. Josh is an honor
roll student at West and takes as many honors classes as his schedule permits. This year,
he took an Advanced Placement European History course for college credit. “The test
was pretty easy,” he said. He hopes to attend University of North Carolina at
Wilmington after he graduates.
Not only is he an A student and a
star shooter for the Hunter Safety team, he plays junior varsity basketball, too. With
everything that’s going on in his life, it would be easy to get bogged down. But Josh
just takes it all into stride. “I’m just going to try to make it to the
top,” he says.
He’s got a good shot at it. |
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