Beaverhill Sporting Clays hosts Canadian National Trapshooting Championships

This past week Beaverhill Sporting Clays hosted the Canadian National Trapshooting Championships, with the finals being held on Sunday, Aug. 12.

Competitors from across the country were seen on the bunker as they tried to battle to the top spot.

Noted former world champion, Alberta’s John Primrose was one of the shooters, who competed at six Olympics from 1968 to 1992, excluding 1980; and won a gold medal in the 1975 Trap World Championships and 1983 World Championships. One of the highlights of his career was winning the gold medal at the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton in 1978.

Primrose was inducted into the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame after winning his first Commonwealth gold medal in New Zealand.

“The season for World Cups is March through October but in Canada, it is pretty much a summer sport although the national team members train whenever it’s warmer than minus 10 degrees,” said Sandra Honour, director, National Trapshooting. “Shooters identified as high performance athletes that go on to make the national team compete in two national level events per year and usually several international competitions to prove they are capable of shooting world class scores on demand.”

The National championships hosted over the past week at the Beaverhill Sporting Clays facility is one of the events that ranks the high performance athletes for selection to represent Canada at World Cups and major Games. Honour is a local official, Master shotgun coach developer and evaluator, besides being the Vice President and shotgun match director and still competes for the fun of it.

National championships and Canada’s involvement in the Olympic sport has been since the early 1900s, according to Honour.

The Shooting Federation of Canada (SFC), the national sport governing body has been in existence since 1936 and has been the one that sanctions competitions to name the National Team in Shotgun rifle and pistol sports to compete for Canada in world events like the Olympics and Pan Am Games.

“I became involved in the sport when invited from another shotgun sport to try out for national trapshooting team in 1993 and was on the team from 1993 to 2014,” Honour added. “I was a national swimming team member until 1984 and when I retired from swimming I realized I had spent more time with my swim coaches than my father, who was a very good recreational shooter in a shotgun sport called American Trap shooting.”