COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado (July 2, 2018)
The final athletes to be named to the USA Shooting Team for the International Shooting Sport Federation (ISSF) World Championship later this summer earned their slots today as the Trap Mixed Team Tryout concluded at the International Shooting Park on Fort Carson.
After two long days of competition, the top-finishing team was Kayle Browning (Wooster, Arkansas) and Will Hinton (U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit/Dacula, Georgia) with a 15-point advantage over second-place team, two-time Olympic bronze medalist Corey Cogdell-Unrein (Eagle River, Alaska) and Qualification world-record holder Jake Wallace (Castaic, California).
Though Browning/Hinton were the top team overall, finishing with the top Qualification score both days as well as winning yesterday’s Final, they had never trained together prior to this match.
“Honestly, we didn’t really know each other before this match started,” Hinton, a past Junior National Champion, said. “We had mutual friends in the same group that knew she didn’t have a partner and I didn’t have a partner. We knew we were both good shots and we just went from there.”
“I just asked my dad ‘Who’d be a good partner?’ and he said Will Hinton,” Browning said. Her father, Tommy, suggested Hinton because he said Hinton “had raw talent and they’d make a good team.”
“We have the same shooting style, so it was easy for us to communicate on shooting,” Kayle Browning said.
Browning had already qualified for the World Championship in Changwon, South Korea in the Women’s Trap event.
For the other team heading to South Korea next month, Wallace had also already qualified for the individual Men’s Trap event and had known his teammate for years.
“I think for us it was pretty easy [to pair up] as we train together almost every day,” Wallace said of his teammate. “When you train together, you kind of have to be athlete, coach, cheerleader and you really have to have a rapport and that’s something we have so it was an easy choice.”
“We’ve been training together for almost seven years so we know each other’s games inside and out,” Cogdell-Unrein said. “It really only took a couple tweaks to figure out how we wanted to talk together throughout the round, figure out how we work best together, and of course, Finals are different, so we had to figure out who was the stronger starter, stronger closer, and we figured that out in training.”
The pair shot Trap Mixed Team together in competition for the first time in May at a Grand Prix where they finished two targets out of the Final.
Finishing in third place was Ashley Carroll and Derek Haldeman. Carroll (Castaic, California) and Haldeman (USAMU/Sunbury, Ohio) finished three points behind Wallace/Cogdell-Unrein and were bronze medalists at last year’s Shotgun World Championship in Moscow, Russia.
Trap Mixed Team is one of the newest events that was added to the Olympic Games and ISSF Championships. The course of fire consisted of each member of the two-person team shooting 75 targets the first day, with the six teams with the highest combined scores advancing to an Elimination Final. The top-three finishers in the Final earned points based on their finish (three for first place, two for second and one for third place). Today the athletes shot an additional 75 targets. The two days of Qualification and yesterday’s Final points were added together, with the top six teams advancing to a Super Final, where each team added the scores they earn in the Super Final to their overall totals, with the top-two teams earning World Championship berths.
The ISSF World Championship for Rifle/Pistol/Shotgun will take place August 31 - September 15 in Changwon, South Korea.
Complete results of Trap Mixed Team tryout