Most teens spend their free time and weekends hanging out with friends, playing high school sports or they have a job, but senior Jayda Branham spends her time playing an interesting sport called sporting clays.

“Sporting clays are clay targets being thrown in the air from any direction, I shoot at them and try to break them,” said Branham.

The main goal of the sport is to shoot as many targets as you can, which are usually clay pigeons. The targets simulate birds that fly at different speeds, distances, and angles.

“I grew up hunting with my dad so I was always around guns and everything,” said Branham.

Jayda was introduced to the idea of using guns at a very young age, then was later introduced into sporting clays itself.

“A family friend opened the sporting club at the farm, and we went one day and I fell in love with it,” said Branham.

Her knowledge of hunting led her to falling in love with the sport on the first encounter. Sporting clays is supposed to resemble hunting birds and is often used to help hunters practice when it is not hunting season. Sporting clays is often compared with golf, but just using a shotgun because the way tournaments are structured and how the terrain at each course is different from one another.

“Competitions are like golf; where we move from stand to stand and there’s typically 14 stands and we shoot about 100 shots in total,” said Branham.

Every competition is composed of a unique course with many stands being different from the last.

“Practice starts in January, competitions typically start in April and end in July. But we can do individual tournaments any time of the year,” said Branham.

The competition season does not have a specific time frame because it is not always a team sport.

“This past year we practiced at The Farm and Indian Creek,” said Branham.

These two places are in Kentucky, so Jayda’s practices are pretty local.

“It’s more of an individual sport scoring wise,” said Branham.

In sporting clays, shooters are scored on their individual performance and not as one big team, even though the club travels as a team. Competitions have a wide range of locations, being either local or far away.

“Most of our small competitions are in Indiana, but all the big ones like regionals and nationals are in Ohio. The farthest we travelled was South Carolina for the Jr. US Open,” said Branham

A sporting clay athlete’s schedule is very jam packed with practices and competitions, but is ultimately a fun thing to get into when looking for something new, according to Branham.

“I would 100% recommend this to people just to go and try out because it’s such a fun hobby,” said Branham.

Sporting clays is a very unique sport which has its perks, but a disadvantage would be its unpopularity.

“Unfortunately it’s such a small sport, not many colleges have a team,” said Branham.

There are still tons of opportunities for sporting clay athletes in college.

“There are tons of scholarships to shoot in college,” said Branham.

With the sport being a pretty small thing and having so many opportunities for a scholarship, it could be a good idea to try and get into this sport.