Jort sighted: Why Hibbing is the team to beat at Minnesota’s high school trap shooting finals

Hibbing High School sophomores Zander Gouldin and Mikko Glad finished the spring trap shooting season in the 99th percentile of competitors across the state. For every 25 clay targets that jetted out of the trap house, each of them nailed an average of more than 24 for each round they played over a period of five weeks.

Their school’s squad of five sharpshooters and two alternates arrived Thursday in Prior Lake as the team to beat for the state championship — the nation’s only clay target tournament recognized by a state high school athletic association. The contest starts at 9 a.m. Friday.

With razor-thin margins separating winners from losers at every trap meet, the Bluejackets convinced their coaches to go along with an apparel option that they hope will give them an edge: cut-off jeans.

“We’re making our own jorts. We’re all wearing jorts,” Glad said. “We like to have fun, and I feel like our team really came together as one this year.”

Prior Lake won the team state championship last year and returns again this year as one of the favorites. But it was Hibbing that finished first overall at the qualifying tournament in Alexandria, which ended Tuesday.

Three Hibbing players shot 99 of 100 clays in Alexandria, leading to a team score of 492 out of 500. Stewartville finished second with a score of 490, followed by Prior Lake at 489 and Wheaton at 488.

John Nelson, president of USA Clay Target League, said the nine-day shootout in Alexandria drew 8,100 student athletes from 348 teams around Minnesota. He called it the largest clay target shooting sports event in the world.

Nelson’s organization will run the one-day finals competition Friday at the Minneapolis Gun Club in Prior Lake. Forty teams and 125 individual shooters will be in the running for trophies presented by the Minnesota State High School League.

Overall in Minnesota, 10,900 students registered to shoot trap this year.

If Hibbing prevails, the team will do so without one of its top guns. Coach Alex Seppala said talented junior Addison Taylor won’t be on the roster. She left for Europe on a pre-planned school trip soon after helping her team snag first place in Alexandria.

“We’re going to miss Addison; she’s been one of our best shooters all year,” Seppala said. “The hardest part now is deciding which five shooters to take to Prior Lake.”

Addison, Manni Glad (Mikko’s brother), and Sam Meyer each broke 99 of 100 clay targets at the Alexandria shootout. Under the same tournament rules that will apply in Prior Lake, shooters step to the lines behind a given trap house four times during a round of competition. Each time, they get a crack at striking 25 targets.

The orange clay “birds” fly one at a time from a machine hidden inside the trap house. The five shooters on the lines take turns. The targets fly left, right or straight away in a random mixture of paths. After every set of five shots, the students step to a new position behind the trap house for their next five.

Seppala was on the 2017 Hibbing High School trap team that finished second in the state championships. This year marks the third time since then that the team has returned, never winning it all.

Alex and his brother Nick Seppala are in their first year of heading the program, but they both credit volunteer Jim Fetzik for feeding the team with accurate young shooters. Fetzik teaches elementary school kids and other “juniors” the footwork and other fundamentals of clay target shooting before they move on to varsity.

“We have good young shooters and we only graduate one senior this year,” Alex Seppala said. “We owe that to Jim.”

Derek Gouldin, father of Hibbing’s top gun Zander Gouldin, said he’s impressed with the depth on this year’s squad. Of the 100 boys statewide who qualified this year for individual honors in Prior Lake, three are from Hibbing: Zander, Mikko Glad and Wyatt Story. Addison Taylor was one of 25 girls statewide who qualified for the state individual competition.

Derek Gouldin thinks Hibbing has a good shot at winning the team title. After all, when the team won in Alexandria by missing only eight of 500 shots, his son Zander was not in the grouping of five that racked up the winning score. Zander was the team’s leading shooter this spring while dominating its conference over five weeks.

“We could have shot zeros in Week 5 and still won our conference by a lot,” Gouldin said.

One of the fundamentals in trap shooting is mental fortitude. You can’t win without it, and Hibbing’s high school team has been tightly focused all year, Gouldin said.

Mikko Glad said the Bluejackets take an all-business approach during competitions, but they’re loose, jovial, supportive of each other and distinctly blue-collar. The vast majority of kids on the team are from hunting families, and no one feels compelled to spend a lot of money on fancy shotguns built strictly for competition at the range.

“My brother shoots a duck gun, and that’s what a lot of people use,” Mikko said.

He said the team wasn’t sure the coaches would agree to the gimmick of wearing jorts to the state finals, but they went along with it. “We’re just playing and having fun,” Glad said.