FORT RILEY, Kan. " Being “voluntold” by his father may have helped find a Fort Riley middle school student a new talent and hobby.
Diego Obregon, who will be an eighth-grader at Fort Riley Middle School this fall, was one of 23 children to participate in the second annual Fort Riley Youth Skeet Camp sponsored by Fort Riley Outdoorsmen Group and the Directorate of Family and Morale, Welfare and Recreation at the Fort Riley Skeet and Trap Range June 28-30.
His father, Staff Sgt. Frank Obregon, Medical Activity, found out about the camp and immediately enrolled his son.
“He’s just one of those kids that everything you ask him is, ‘Hey, do you want to give it a shot?’ and he’s like “Nah, I wouldn’t like it anyway,”’ Obregon said. “I told him, ‘Hey, you just got signed up, buddy. You’ve been voluntold.’”
After getting out there and trying it, Diego talked excitedly about how things went, his father said.
“He comes back home and he’s talking about, ‘Oh, I hit this and hit that and missed this one,’” Obregon said. “Yeah, he enjoys it, and he made some new friends out here as well.”
At the end of the week, Diego won both skeet shooting competitions for the afternoon session group.
“I was like ‘wow,’” said Obregon, who videotaped the competitions. “I didn’t know he could shoot that darn good. He’s mainly a video-gaming kid, and watching him go out there and have actually fun, getting out away from the console and actually getting out there behind the trigger, it’s really good.”
Diego said shooting a real shotgun isn’t as easy and is harder to aim than on a first-person shooter video game.
“The gun just shoots a lot of bullets on the video games, but you have to reload, and it takes forever,” Diego said. “It’s not the same.”
Diego, who hadn’t really handle a shotgun until a brief outing with his father a couple weeks before the camp, was pretty experienced at the end of the camp, he said.
“It was fun,” he said. “The competition was hard. I enjoyed it for the past couple of days.”
He said his favorite parts were shooting from the low house, shooting with his friends and the competition.
The camp this year was in a different form than last year, said John Ball, Mission Support Element and FROG executive board member. Enrollment was capped and split into a morning session and afternoon session.
“We had some other leadership activities associated with last year’s camp,” he said. “Last year, when you went all day, they were kind of worn out by the end of the day. Now, they actually shoot on the range for about three or three-and-a-half hours with regular breaks, and they seem to be more alert and less tired by the end of the day.”
With smaller groups allowing for more one-on-one instruction, new shotguns that are “more youth-friendly” furnished by FROG, and a stronger focus on the shooting, Ball said the children were hitting targets at a much higher percentage this year.
Some of the children from the camp last year returned this year. Most of the children, however, had no experience.
“They went from most of them never have even handled a shotgun to now being able to handle a shotgun and shoot a moving target,” he said. “The future of any sport is always the youth that come up, so you introduce the youth to how to handle a gun, how to safely handle a shotgun and you see if they like it, and they will grow up to enjoy the sport and participate in the sport.”
Ball said he was happy with how the camp went this year.
“Every year, you learn something a little more,” Ball said. “I wish I could figure out how to do it when it was cooler.”
For more information on the Fort Riley Skeet and Trap Range, call 785-239-9058. For more information on FROG, visit www.fortrileyoutdoorsmengroup.com or e-mail frog@fortrileyoutdoorsmengroup.com.
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