In fewer than 10 years, Culver's shooting sports program has grown from an initial Summer Camp offering to a year-round program that now has a waiting list of students who want to sign up.

Thanks to the generosity of several donors over the past seven years, Culver boasts a shooting sports facility outfitted with everything needed for a safe, effective program that teaches proper respect and responsibility for firearms while honing students' skills on a shooting range that includes high and low houses and sporting clay pigeon equipment. The range includes a regulation skeet layout as well as a regulation trap field.

Good equipment also needs good instructors. The co-sponsors of the shooting sports program – Ed Little, Director of Horsemanship Operations, and Gary Hinton, a senior instructor in the Wellness Department – are both Level 2 certified skeet instructors by the National Skeet Shooting Association. They are also both certified by the National Rifle Association to teach shotgun sports, which includes skeet shooting, trap shooting and sporting clays. In the summer, national champion shooters join the Culver Summer Schools & Camps staff to teach campers and summer students while honing their own skills.

Intramural competitions in the spring and winter are used as a springboard for Culver students to compete throughout the state.

In addition to the obvious lessons in the safe handling of firearms, students are finding an athletic event that not only appeals to people who are great athletes, but also to people who find it a little more difficult to compete in the "traditional" high school sports. Hinton adds that college scholarship opportunities are available in shooting sports at post-secondary schools around the country (some Culver students have already gone on to distinguish themselves nationally in college).

As for the future, Culver is in the process of designing a 5-stand course, which is a scaled down version of sporting clays, Hinton says.

"With the grounds we have out there and the facilities we have out there, we're really only limited by our imagination."