Yesterday, USA Shooting and the National Wild Turkey Federation (NWTF) united to hold what they called “Turkeys for Tokyo” - a sporting clays benefit to raise money for USA Shooting. If you’re thinking, that’s no big deal, you’d be mistaken.

You see, both groups are not-for-profit. That’s right, USA Shooting is not funded by the “full faith and credit of the United States government”. They get a grand total of zero federal funds. The organization and its athletes work, tirelessly, it seems to raise the money it takes to keep the organization alive- and the athletes climbing atop the medal stands around the world.

As USA Shooting's Kevin Neuendorf (left) introduced the USA Shooting team members in attendance, his boss, Keith Enlow (Center in red) cheered everyone on.

Since the NWTF is focused on the turkey, it makes perfect sense that the USA Shooting teams represented at the Nashville Gun Club yesterday were from our national shotgun teams. Our national shotgun team has pretty much dominated the world competitions recently, so it was a strong group of shooters, including two time Olympic gold medalist Vincent Hancock.

But the story of yesterday’s event, at least for me, wasn’t just the fact that two organizations were working together for their mutual benefit. Granted, that’s strong, but the strength of the event for me was in the fact that it was multi-generational. The junior team members ran the shooting stations, helped with shooting strategy, kept score and reaffirmed the fact that no matter how much we hear to the contrary, we’re still producing quality young people.

And those quality young people are goal-oriented, courteous and not afraid of hard work if that’s what it takes to reach their goals. OK, sometimes they couldn’t help but laugh at some of the ways we managed to find ways to miss, but the competitors were clearly more focused on fun than breaking every clay target.

In a word, we were having fun. And that’s something we frequently overlook when we talk about “why” as in why we hunt, fish, shoot, hike, bike, camp, whatever. These kinds of events put the “fun” back in recreation. And that’s what shooting sports are supposed to be: fun.

It's not often you have a corporate executive, an aged reporter, a rising country musician and a former MLB player hanging around with each other- much less having this much fun. Events like "Turkeys for Tokyo" are designed to put the "fun" back in shooting sports. When it comes down to the shooting (below) it’s not hard to see that Ryan Klesco is still blessed with major league hand/eye coordination.

Our team didn’t do much to threaten Vincent Hancock’s 96 out of 100 targets, but there’s not much doubt we’d be somewhere on the podium when it came to fun. And we all agreed that this kind of event is one we’d like to see more often.

Having played in far more Pro-am events where there’s so much focus on scoring that there’s no fun, I completely “get” the atmosphere created by the two groups. The focus was never on anything other than remembering how much fun shooting and hunting can be.

“We’re excited at how quickly we pulled this event together,” USA Shooting’s Keith Enlow told me, “we couldn’t ask for a better partner for what is really a historic ‘first’ for us.”

Hopefully, the word will get around about just how much fun this kind of event is for everyone.”

He’s right, it was a fun event, and I left thinking that it might be time for me to dust off the turkey box calls that have been sitting in my turkey vest for several seasons. After all, I’ve made new friends who live just a short drive from me- and they tell me they have a “turkey problem” I could help them remedy.

We’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, thanks to NWTF and USA Shooting for a reminder of how much I enjoy shooting sports.

—Jim Shepherd