Imagine if high school football did not exist. However, a group of gridiron enthusiasts was trying to convince school boards that football should be supported for the good of the children and the district.

They explain the sport requires lots of student-athletes to comprise a team and the mandatory safety equipment to prevent broken bones and concussions is expensive.

And, by the way, the town’s ambulance should be on standby at every game. If this hypothetical example was the case today, football wouldn’t stand a chance of becoming a mainstream, school-sponsored sport.

A situation is playing out with a different high school sport which is trying to gain traction; clay target shooting.

Currently, only one local school district has a clay target shooting team, Gilbertsville-Mount Upton School District. This team sport was recently approved by the school board members - unanimously.

GMU is located in the river valley between Chenango and Otsego counties. The “home field” for the GMU Clay Raiders is the Gilbertsville Rod and Gun club. Just like their bi-county school district, the rod and gun club sits in Otsego County but has a South New Berlin, Chenango County address.

In order to avoid any confusion and to have everyone on the same page of music, here’s exactly what the GMU Clay Raiders do on Wednesday afternoons during their season. The team, with trained adult supervision fire shotguns at flying clay disks targets. The scores for hitting targets are recorded and then compared to other high school shooting teams in the league. The team motto is; “Safety, Fun, Marksmanship.”

Now that we all know high school students are handling and shooting firearms, some people are probably experiencing handwringing and teeth gnashing at the thought of this being a school-sponsored competition. Presently across New York State, there are just under a hundred school-sanctioned teams with over 1500 student-athletes participating and this number is growing. Proponents say this is exactly how young people should learn to respect and safely handle firearms; by trained adult instructors in a controlled environment.

Safety education topics taught in schools are nothing new and for years are paramount for the future of our children. Reducing teen death in car crashes is the reason driver education became a mandatory class for students in the 1950s. Later, in the 1970s, swimming lessons in newly built high school pools helped lessen the number of deaths from accidental drowning – which is the second leading cause of death of teens after car crashes.

Setting aside all the safety education aspects, clay target shooting teams allow a wide variety of students to participate, not just “the jocks.” Shooting sports allow males, females, and the wheelchair bound to be on an even playing field in side-by-side competition. Uniforms consist of a t-shirt or polo shirt and safety equipment is minimal (glasses and hearing protection), with the shotguns provided by the individual marksman or sporting clubs. Target shooting, unlike football, baseball or track, is a sport which a student can easily continue competitively well into adulthood.

Nationwide, there are thousands of high schools with shooting team members who have fired millions of rounds of ammunition and not once has any high school shooting athlete been injured by a shot fired while participating in this competition. This statistic alone begs for comparison to high school football, or even baseball.

We live in a rural area where hunting and outdoor activities are plentiful, but firearms safety education is overlooked in our schools by design. Keeping your head in the sand doesn’t make all of the firearms magically go away. Trying to legislate-away firearms possession would be on the same scale as trying to outlaw cars.

I suggest the correct thing is for the New York legislature to allow school boards to teach firearms safety as an important educational topic. Schools should encourage students, if they chose to participate, in firearms safety classes, off premises if need be. Further, school boards should sanction clay target shooting teams in their districts. This will give a whole new group of students an opportunity to compete on a team at the high school level, to receive recognition and possibly a scholarship. It will also instill personal responsibility in the involved students.

Let’s think back to a time when high school parking lots had pick-up trucks with gun racks and the first day of deer hunting season was the highest absentee day for the school year; a time when school yearbooks had all the posed team photos, including the rifle team. That was also a time when no one ever heard of a school mass shooting incident.