News

By Ryan Schlehuber, MCC Sportswriter

As the fall season cools the air, the Montcalm Community College Centurions clay target team are getting warmed up for the season with the opening day of shooting, Friday, Sept. 26.  

The seven-man team, coached by Chris Henry, had an “OK” day with its first week of shooting, held at Flat River Conservation Club in Greenville. 

“We can do better,” said Henry, who took over the team as head coach this season. “We did well but we definitely have better in us.” 

Each athlete shot a round of 50 shots in trap and 50 in skeet, with sophomore Chase Merritt (Greenville, Mich.) performing the best, successfully hitting 48 targets in trap and a 48 in skeet. Sophomore Jack McBride (Portland, Mich.) followed with a 49 in trap and 46 in skeet.  

Henry said McBride was most impressive this week. 

“He’s been really solid in both trap and skeet,” Henry said. “But Chase did well, too, as expected.” 

Despite this being the opening week of competition, Henry said he has high expectations for this team right out of the gate, however, Friday’s shooting wasn’t as sharp as he thought it would be. 

“It’s possible to be perfect, even this early,” Henry said. “You can kind of expect that, definitely. I think four of our shooters could’ve been perfect in trap. It was a beautiful night to do it, but it just didn’t work out.” 

This was the first of four consecutive weeks of the Centurions league shooting, which the next will be Friday, Oct. 3. MCC competes in the USA College Clay Target League, which has 100 college teams (both two-year and four-year schools) competing across the country. 

MCC will compete in its first invitational Saturday, Oct. 18, at the 2025 Hoosier Classic Fall Invitational, a two-day event, which will be held at the Fulton County Gun Club in Rochester, Ind. 

In the meantime, Henry will be working on getting his team sharp for the next weekly competition, in which he hopes each of his shooters will have adjusted their approach to improve on scores. 

“Most of them are skilled enough to know what they have to do,” Henry said. “We went over the small things already, so I hope to see improvement in the next conference shooting.” 

In weekly competitions, teams only have to arrive at their own gun range and do their rounds of shooting, with no other opponents present. Henry said because there are no head-to-head competitions, his athletes feed on each other’s competitiveness, which helps them be sharp. 

“They’re all fairly competitive anyway, so it doesn’t take much to get them going,” Henry said. “They know every bird counts in our league. They’re definitely feeding off each other, for sure.” 

WEEK 1 COMPETITION RESULTS 

NAME                  TRAP       SKEET 

Chase Merritt       48           48 

Evan Plonka         45           45 

Jack McBride        49           46 

Logen Steffen       47           44 

Collin Sutton         47           42 

Hunter Doolittle     46           41 

Liam Jensen          41           37