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  1. #1
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    Bouncing Back From A Serious Injury To Win MISCTP Skeet Championship

    A young mid Michigan shotgun shooter lost his left thumb in a woodworking accident on April 20th, but got his head game back together to claim the Michigan Scholastic Clay Target Program State Skeet Championship in his division on June 15th. Recovery in 55 days!

    Aiden Adkins was a good shot before the accident with a skeet championship last year, but recovering from a serious injury like this inside two months spanning his high school graduation is remarkable. The AP posted a heartening long form story on both his injury and his divisioonal skeet championship:

    https://apnews.com/d1b63deda0c94e26b6171f3f375a9744

    Carson City graduate wins skeet championship with 1 thumb
    Alex Freeman -- July 22, 2019

    CARSON CITY, Mich. (AP) —
    The thumbs up — a universal sign that everything is all right.

    On June 15, Aiden Adkins, 17, a recent graduate from Carson City-Crystal High School (CC-C), posed for photos with a championship belt buckle courtesy of the Michigan Scholastic Clay Target Program after he won the state championship in skeet shooting in the senior/varsity division.

    Although he could only show a single thumb up in the photos, everything was right in the world from Aiden’s perspective. In his final sports season with the CC-C clay target team, he was able to etch his name into the record books as the first state champion in the young history of the program.

    This run was all the more improbable due to an incident two months prior, when Aiden lost his left thumb while cutting wood, the Daily News reported.

    It was the morning of April 20, the day before Easter Sunday.

    Aiden had set himself a task of making a box for his girlfriend to ask her to prom. With his father, Ben, providing him instruction and with Aiden’s experience in using the chop saw in the family barn, he thought nothing of the task.

    “I’ve made cuts with that more times than I can count,” Aiden recalled.

    Aiden was hoping to finish the project before leaving for a competition with the clay target team, which was set to compete in Belmont that afternoon.

    Ben and his wife, Heather, were at the grocery store in Crystal when they received a phone call. It was from Aiden, and immediately, Heather knew something was wrong.

    “Ben answers and I just hear Ben say, ‘OK, we’ll be right there, you have to find it,’” Heather recalled. “I knew immediately something was going on, so we jump in the car and we’re coming home from Crystal and he said (Aiden) cut his thumb off.”

    It was a moment of shock, not pain, for Aiden, who had seen something fly from his peripheral vision, but assumed it was a piece of wood.

    “I thought maybe I nicked my thumb or something because I knew it didn’t feel right,” Aiden said. “I tried to fold it over and grab it and when I did that I still didn’t know that I didn’t have it.”

    After a double-take at his hand, Aiden realized it wasn’t a piece of wood that went flying, it was his entire thumb. Cutting it about halfway through the second knuckle, Aiden did his best to remain calm.

    Heather, who was still driving, saw the injury for the first time when Aiden called his father on FaceTime.

    “Ben shows me the phone and we know, I mean, Aiden said it was his whole thumb but it was really his whole thumb,” Heather said.

    Aiden was given a few instructions from his father — find the thumb, get it on ice and don’t drive anywhere. Ben and Heather rushed home to get Aiden to Sparrow Carson Hospital in Carson City.

    While Heather drove Aiden to the emergency room, Ben looked for the missing thumb. By this point, Heather and Ben had contacted several family members to make them aware of the situation, many of whom stayed at the house to help Ben in his search.

    “We now have 11 people at our house going through our shop. They’re trying to look through every box, everything, they finally start taking stuff from the barn and they put it in the driveway,” Heather recalled. “I kept telling them at the hospital, ’You have to tell me a timeframe because if they find this and then you say to me, ‘No, it’s too late,’ you know, I have all these people looking.′ So they gave us a six-hour window to have Aiden and his thumb in Ann Arbor in an operating room.”

    As the hospital staff assessed the damage, they gave Aiden an IV, some pain medicine and told him they’d need to transfer him to Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids.

    Heather remembers Aiden being surprisingly calm, even joking with a buddy he saw at the hospital.

    “While we’re up there waiting for the ambulance, a guy comes in that Aiden knows that’s on the ambulance,” Heather said. “And Aiden says, ‘Hey, how ya doing? I’d give you a thumbs up right now but I just cut it off.’”

    Keeping calm and joking around was a coping mechanism for Aiden. He was like that throughout the whole process. He never panicked and didn’t shed a tear. He didn’t want to have a pity party. He knew it wouldn’t help.

    “I know if I start freaking out and start going into that state, I was worried about my girlfriend because I was making the box for her and I didn’t want her to feel like it was her fault,” Aiden said. “Dad and I went over that morning how I should make it and I didn’t want him to feel like it was his fault. I knew if I stayed strong about it, it’d make everyone else strong about it too and not worry so much. It’d put a lot more stress on everybody else if I was just down. I knew it happened, it’s not like I can just take it and put it back on.”

    After nearly three hours of searching, Ben finally gave up on the missing thumb and headed to DeVos. To this day, the family has yet to find the thumb.....

    <snip>

    ....In a year where Mark [Jenson, the schools clay target coach] thought the team could contend for a team state title in the sporting clays division, the team’s best discipline, he immediately thought of the loss of his best sporting clays shooter.

    Not one to be held down by other’s expectations, Aiden tested out his hand on his firearm in the coming week and he was able to grip it without much issue. Ten days following the accident, his stitches were removed and he pleaded with his doctors.

    “I said, ‘Listen, I’ve held a gun, I’ve mounted the gun like I would shoot, it doesn’t hurt resting against it, am I able to shoot?’ Aiden explained. “And they said, ‘You can do it to your pain tolerance, but if it hurts at all, don’t do it.’”

    It was settled — Aiden would return to practice just 18 days after the accident and, after his first few practice shots, felt little to no pain. The quick turnaround was a shock to Mark.

    “When he came back out and shot his first practice round, I think he shot a 23 (out of 25) in his first round back (in skeet) and I was like, ‘Wow, it doesn’t seem to have any effect,’” Mark said. “His ability to stay loose, as I talked to him before he came back to the team, he seemed upbeat, he seemed mentally in the right frame of mind and it seemed like it’d be good for him because he was dealing well with this. That just transferred right over to his shooting right once he came back.”

    Aiden’s first competition was just three days following his first practice on May 11, and he didn’t disappoint. He had his self-proclaimed best shooting day of the season at the skeet and sporting clays conference championship, hitting 90 out of 100 targets in sporting clays and 93 out of 100 in skeet (a personal best).

    “It was a great day, and I don’t know if it was because if I did bad, I could just say, ‘Well, I cut my thumb off so it doesn’t really matter,’” Aiden joked.

    There would be a month-long gap in between his next competition, which was the skeet and sporting clays state championship on June 15.

    The day started off with Aiden’s best discipline — sporting clays. Reality hit quickly though as he had his worst round ever, a 72. Aiden’s confidence took a hit.

    “I was thinking, ‘This is how today is going to go, are you kidding me? This is going to just suck,’” he said.

    After a pep talk from his dad, Aiden stepped up to his first round in the afternoon session, which was skeet shooting. While he hit 24 out of 25 targets in the first round, his mind was stuck on the target he missed — his first shot on the second station.

    “I’m not an average 25 (per round) shooter by any means. I average 22 or 23, so I started off good, but you just kind of kick yourself for that one (missed) target,” he said.

    Aiden regathered himself for his second round of 25 shots, and nailed all 25.

    “I shot on my next station and I went, ‘Damn, that felt good.’ I got really comfortable,” he said. “I went from there and I kept thinking about the people that are there to support me and the people that would be there if they could be there to support me. I just went through and I shot out of my mind. It was crazy. I got in a groove.”

    Aiden didn’t miss a shot in his final two rounds and ended the skeet competition hitting 99 out of 100 targets, including 95 shots in a row.

    While Mark had watched Aiden near the top of the leaderboard all day, he held his joy until the final target was broken.

    “In the skeet divisions, there are a lot of schools over on the east side, especially where skeet is their main sport,” Mark explained. “They don’t shoot trap and they may or may not shoot sporting clays. It’s very tough competition and skeet is a game of perfection where it takes 99 or 100 to win. He was on a run, but if he misses one or two more targets, it drops him down to 10th or 12th place. So until that last target was broke, between a 99 and a 98 is several places. When he was done, when he had his 99 then it was like, ‘OK, we have a shot here.’”

    Then came the waiting game to see if anyone would tie his 99. After all competitors finished, Aiden was left with one competitor tied at 99 — Soren Hanson of Lowell, who shoots for the Kent County Conservation League Orange Crushers team.

    The two headed to a shoot-off, which involved shooting two targets released simultaneously. Opponents would alternate in a sudden death format as the second opponent would try to match or surpass the targets hit by the first opponent.

    This was uncharted territory for Aiden, Mark and the entire CC-C team.

    “We’ve never shot in a shoot-off, as a team, as anything,” Mark said. “I’d never personally done it.”

    Aiden learned the rules of the shoot-off, took some practice shots and chatted with fellow competitors regarding his opponent.

    “I’ve never been in a shoot-off before and I’d heard this kid has done it before and always crushes it,” Aiden said. “I thought, ‘This is great, I’ve never done this before and this kid has done it how-many-ever times.’”

    Even though the perceived cards were stacked against him, Aiden wasn’t nervous.

    “I don’t get nervous,” he said, confidently. “I’ve been nervous two times my whole high school career — both in wrestling at the individual state meet, that’s when I got nervous. I got nervous because it was my first time (last year) and I got nervous because it was my last time (this year). With this, I knew what I was doing but I just didn’t get nervous. Normally, I shake a little bit, like when I shot my first 25, I wasn’t nervous but I could feel my heart beat a little bit (faster) like you have to get this. But I was just shooting, it was just another target.”

    Soren was first in the shoot-off and hit his first shot but surprisingly missed his second. As Aiden stepped up to the station, he kept his cool, hit his first shot to tie, slowed down, focused and hit the second target, ending the shoot-off and earning him the state championship.

    Aiden saw his dad moments later. Ben’s eyes were welled up with tears and he wasn’t the only one.

    “He goes up and hits both targets and I was just like, ‘Oh my god.’ I’m getting chills talking about it now,” Mark said. “I immediately had tears in my eyes because I can’t believe that this just happened from everything that happened this season. I’m still not sure how it happened.”

    With the CC-C clay target program starting four years ago and Aiden being one of the original freshman members, it was special for him, the coaching staff and the entire program to experience that moment of greatness.

    “My coach was real proud given that we just started the shooting team four years ago, it’s kind of a big deal for one of the (original) kids to do this,” Aiden said. “I was there from the time it started to when I graduated and for me to be the first (state champion) was a cool experience for me. I was really happy with myself for that and I know a lot of the younger kids look up to me and any of the older kids. To be able to be that role model and give them a goal to shoot for, that’s pretty cool.

    “And there’s going to be many more to come,” he added. “I’m 100% for sure of it because we’ve got some stud little kids coming up. But it’s cool that I can be that person that they have their goals set for.”

    Even to Aiden, the feat is almost unexplainable. It was his day, he was simply in a groove.

    Rather than sulking, Aiden stayed active, determined, focused, driven, didn’t give up on his goals and lived his life the way he did before — minus a thumb. He knows a lot of people in his position may have given up or changed their lifestyle, but he wasn’t about to make that an option for himself.

    “Anybody could have said, ‘Nope, I’m done, I’m not risking anything.’ They could be the couch potato and watch movies all day and have everybody wait on them, but that wasn’t me,” he said. “It gave me more of a drive. Cutting your thumb off is a pretty all right deal, you do that, you screwed up pretty big. But if I can get through stuff without having the thumb, I can get through a lot of things.”

    Aiden is a firm believer that everything happens for a reason and, while he’s not sure why this happened to him, he hopes one day to figure it out. Until then, he’s going to soak up the life lessons this experience has taught him and hope to influence others to overcome the trials in their life.

    “A lot of things are possible, it’s just a matter of how hard you want to work for it,” he said. “I knew everything was going to be a challenge but I don’t like losing. If I can win, I’ll do anything I can to win. I didn’t want to let this beat me, I can’t let it put me down, I have to beat it. That was my mindset and I want other people to have that mindset, as well.”

  2. #2

  3. #3
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    Another story on a rising young Paralympic trapshooter with a far more daunting disability:

    https://gazette.com/life/on-target-o...a899a.amp.html

    One-armed Colorado Springs girl finds success in trap shooting
    Bill Radford -- July 29, 2019


    Sophia Bultema puts two shells into the shotgun, then takes her stance, holding the gun with her right hand while resting the barrel on the stump where her left arm should be.

    Leaning forward, she tips the gun up, then down. “Pull,” she commands. An orange clay pigeon flies into the sky. She fires, and the pigeon shatters, countless pieces falling to the ground.

    It’s on to the next station for 15-year-old Sophia as her trap-shooting practice continues at the USA Shooting range at Fort Carson. She’s only been shooting for a year or so as part of the St. Mary’s High School shooting team, but her coach calls her progress “totally incredible.” And now a couple of Olympic shooters have taken her under their wings.

    It’s just the latest chapter in a story that has taken her from an orphanage in China to a loving family in Colorado Springs and now, potentially, to the Paralympics in Tokyo in 2020. And this chapter, she and father Patrick stress, was only made possible by the generosity of those supporting her, from her coaches to a company that donated a gun to the prosthetist helping her adjust to her high-tech, $140,000 prosthetic arm — what Patrick calls her Luke Skywalker arm.

    There’s also Sophia’s good luck charm: Ollie, the Bultemas’ English cocker spaniel. Ollie goes to competitions with Sophia, and she rubs his belly before each event. “He’s got a nice little belly,” she says.

    A mental sport

    Sophia is one of three girls whom Patrick and Lily Bultema have adopted from China. The first two, Annika, now 22, and Ellora, 20, were adopted as babies. But Sophia, whose largely missing left arm is the result of a fairly common birth defect, was 6 when she was adopted; she had lived most of her life in the orphanage and spoke no English, had never met a foreigner.

    “You had white hair,” she says to her dad. “I had never seen white hair.”

    Though they were taking Sophia from the only home she had known, the Bultemas believed they could offer her a better future — and a loving household that included two sisters from her homeland. (The Bultemas also have another daughter and three sons.)

    Today, Sophia is the only kid still at home. “I’m definitely spoiled,” she says. She’s a typical teen, walking away embarrassed when Patrick tears up at a certain memory. She likes Korean pop, reading, watching TV. Her least favorite subjects in school are science and math — “surprisingly,” she says, because “most Asians are supposed to be, like, good at math.”

    Some of her friends were a little dubious, she says, when she took up shooting, “but I think overall they think it’s pretty cool.” St. Mary’s became the first high school in the state to have a sanctioned clay shooting team when it added the program a couple of years ago.

    Sophia’s dad does trap shooting, so taking up the sport gave them a common pursuit. “I really like breaking the clays,” she says. “And I like how everyone’s really nice and supportive of what I do and what the team does.”

    When she first picked up a gun, though, she was skeptical. “I didn’t really like loud noises,” she says. “And I thought the clays were like super fast, so it seemed impractical.”

    John Westfall, the St. Mary’s shooting team coach, says he had no qualms about taking on a one-armed shooter.

    “When she first started, she couldn’t get a target,” he recalls. “God bless her, she stuck with it and went to several practices without hitting the target. I can remember the first time she hit one; she was so excited.”

    She was not used to using her left arm, which ends just below the elbow, so shooting put a strain on it and her back. “My arm was way smaller, because I never used it,” she says. Now, she adds proudly, that left arm has been built up.

    Shooting, though, is more a mental sport than a physical one. You have to remain calm but “hyper aware” at the same time — a state of “mindfullness,” says Dale Royer, one of her USA Shooting coaches.

    “You clear your mind so your eyes grab onto the clay as soon as it becomes visible,” Patrick says. “You don’t really aim the shotgun. You have the shotgun perfectly placed and you just look for the clay and your eyes grab it.”

    For her first gun, Patrick bought one and adapted it for Sophia. Then Kodiak Firearms in the Springs donated a gun; now she has a third gun, a Krieghoff, provided and customized by Royer and Caitlin Connor, Royer’s fiancee and the reigning women’s world champion in skeet shooting. Sophia uses the gun from Kodiak to shoot skeet with the St. Mary’s team; for trap, she uses the Krieghoff.

    She shoots American trap with the St. Mary’s team; with USA Shooting, Sophia shoots international trap, which, among other things, involves a faster-moving target.

    “The international is considered the most challenging shotgun game in the world,” says Sharee Waldron, shotgun team manager with USA Shooting. And it’s the basis of Para Trap, which is expected to make its debut at the 2020 Paralympics in Tokyo.

    While the Paralympics have other shooting sports, Para Trap “is definitely just emerging,” Waldron says. Since the USOC won’t fund it until it becomes a recognized sport, USA Shooting is trying to get the word out.

    “Until it gets established,” she says, “we have to figure out private funding.”

    Looking to Tokyo

    Sophia is doing well, Royer says, but she will have to shoot “a bit higher” to compete at the World Championships this fall in Sydney, Australia. That, in turn, would be her path to Tokyo.

    If she goes to Tokyo, her new arm will go with her — but she can’t use it in competition. The rules for shooters with upper limb issues don’t allow any assistive device that is not generally available to all, Patrick says. (It was a lengthy process to get the arm approved for insurance, he says, and still required “a significant co-pay.”) Even if the prosthetic were allowed, there is concern that the shock of shooting could damage the sophisticated arm. And Sophia would lose the direct sensation and touch that she has with her residual limb.

    Away from the shooting range, though, the new arm gets plenty of use — so much that the i-limb ultra hand from Touch Bionics has broken several times.

    Touch Bionics engineers have redesigned the hand in light of the problems Sophia has had, said Dave Nalder with Horizon Prosthetics in Colorado Springs.

    “I don’t think they were used to a little person like her being so hard on the device. She really put it to the test.”

    To get the arm, Sophia, Patrick and Nalder traveled to a Touch Bionics facility in Ohio for a training and prototyping process.

    The i-limb ultra is designed to look and move like a natural hand. “Even though her hand may be gone, the nerves that feed to the hand are still in existence,” Nalder says. “So we’re just tapping into the functionality of the nerves that originally would have gone down to the hand.”

    There were concerns, though. “She never had a need to wiggle those muscles,” Nalder says, “so we were worried she wouldn’t have the pattern recognition. But she surprised us.”

    Sophia says she is grateful that Nalder and others have “put up” with her. “I’m 15. I’m a teenager. I can’t be at the top of their list to hang out with.”

    But Nalder laughs at the idea that he’s had to “put up” with her.

    “She’s fantastic,” he says. “She’s just so much fun to work with.”

    Says Waldron: “She’s a pretty phenomenal young woman.”
    Lots of photos at the hyperlink, above.

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