North Ridgeville shooting sports club team to compete in regional invitational

Sportsmen’s Gun and Reel Club, 44165 Middle Ridge Road in Elyria Township, will host its largest shooting event to date this month put on by the North Ridgeville Shooting Sports Team.

With 130 shooters officially registered from around the area, the inaugural Lake Erie Youth Invitational tournament will take place June 29.

The Ohio Clay Target League and the USA Clay Target League are sponsoring the event.

Jason Brooks, coach of the North Ridgeville Shooting Sports Team, has worked to put the event together along with a few co-organizers.

Shooting is the fastest growing sport in the country, Brooks said.

“It started in 2017, and we were one of the original six or seven teams,” he said. “I think this year at the state tournament, there were 27 teams.

“It’s the fastest growing sport in the country right now.”

The competition has exploded in popularity since the turn of the decade largely due to two factors, according to Brooks.

The sport includes education on gun safety, and is perhaps the safest sport in the United States in terms of injuries, he said.

“Number one, it’s the safest sport in the country,” Brooks said. “We have zero injuries … no reported injuries since the inception of (the USA Clay Target League), and I think the league is in its 15th year.”

In response to the sport’s rise in popularity, Brooks and a few other local shooting sports coaches created the Lake Erie Youth Invitational.

Now, Northeast Ohio will have a youth shooting sports tournament for the region to call its own.

“The last two years, there’s a couple of tournaments that we’ve been going to in Pennsylvania,” Brooks said. “We’ve become friends with those teams, and we decided to run our own.

“We thought maybe we would get 50 to 75 kids. We sold out the event.

“And actually, opened it up a little bit more.”

Though affiliated with North Ridgeville City Schools, the team is not registered with the Ohio High School Athletic Association, Brooks said.

The team’s club status has allowed them to recruit players from other schools to help bolster their roster.

“It actually allows us to have kids from other schools,” Brooks said. “We have kids from 10 different schools on our team … of the 70, 50 plus are from North Ridgeville. We have kids from all over the place.”

Currently, the North Ridgeville students are the state champions in trap shooting, and state runners up in skeet shooting, he said.

The Lake Erie Youth Invitation presents some tough contenders to that title, Brooks noted, with multiple shooters expected to fetch nearly perfect scores.

“This event will consist of these great kids shooting 100 clay targets each,” Brooks said. “We have kids coming from all over Ohio and Pennsylvania for this first of its kind event.

“This event will not only be the first of its kind in Northeast Ohio, it will be the largest event held at Sportmen’s Gun and Reel (Club).”

Brooks said he is thrilled with the sport’s explosion throughout the region and the United States as a whole.

As the June 29 tournament draws near, he expressed his excitement for the growing number of kids willing to give shooting sports a shot.

“We have a couple of fairly young kids who are shooting ridiculously well,” Brooks said. “The amount of fun these kids have is insane.

“And then, once the kids start shooting, the parents decide, ‘oh, I can do this with my kids.’ This really truly is a lifelong sport.”

More information on the Lake Erie Youth Invitational shooting sports tournament is available at www.ohiotrap.com.