Stockton Trap & Skeet Club has set its sights on shooting fun for 80 years

When Mike Belanger wants to relax and have a little summer fun, he reaches for his shotgun.

Belanger is president of the Stockton Trap & Skeet Club, an institution that traces its roots back to the 1940s. In addition to being a range where locals can drop by to knock off a few targets, the club also hosts some prestigious regional and national competitions.

And it’s open to everyone; you don’t have to be a member. Anyone who owns a shotgun and has a knack for target shooting — from kids to seniors — can come and test their marksmanship.

Belanger said he’s seen parents bring children as young as 10.

Shooters need to bring their own gun. Belanger recommends safety glasses and earplugs as well. The club sells lead-shot ammunition. Pistols and rifles aren’t allowed.

There are three options for shooting at the club.

One is traps. Clay targets are hurled aloft in a direction away from the shooter.

In skeet shooting, targets are launched from either side of the field and cross in front of the shooter. Depending on the preference of the marksman, the targets are either launched one at a time or hurled from opposite sides at the same time.

And then there’s Belanger’s favorite, a variation called helice. It involves five machines that fling bow-tie-shaped plastic discs in the air. The shooter never knows which machine will fire next. The two-part discs have a pair of fins that make them fly in wildly unpredictable ways. The goal is to hit the center of the target so the cap separates from the body.

No matter which option the shooter chooses, targets don’t go airborne until the participant shouts the command for which the sport is best known: “Pull!” There are about 25 targets per round.

For Belanger, target shooting grew out of a childhood love of hunting. He began skeet shooting after he got out of college. With sessions at the club about three times a month, the Morada resident has participated in the sport for about 40 years.

He’s modest about his accomplishments. A shelf of trophies? “Not too many,” Belanger says.

The club has about 150 members and gets an impressive number of visits from school groups. One of the most active is the 67-member competitive shooting team from Saint Mary’s High School in Stockton. The team, part of the California Youth Shooting Sports Association, competes against other school squads in the area.

“Every year it has grown,” Tony Ghio, one of Saint Mary’s coaches, said of the club’s history.

One reason for its popularity: Skeet and trap shooting is a sport that boys and girls have an equal chance of success. Accurate shooting is more about concentration and reflexes than sheer strength or heft.

Slightly more than half of the members are girls.

The sport is taken seriously. Gun safety is the top priority, Ghio said. Students aren’t allowed to participate unless they can prove they have passed a gun safety course.

Ghio comes from a family of hunters. He got involved with the Saint Mary’s team when his daughter Hannah wanted to join. She’s now a 21-year-old college student, but Ghio, a Stockton resident, has stayed with the high schoolers.

For the students, the team is about camaraderie as much as sport. When they aren’t on the range, the teens still find ways to make fun connections with the gun club. Ghio recalled one group of boys who started a card game using empty shotgun shells as poker chips.

“The kids make it worth doing,” he said. “They come out there, they all get along and they’re friends.”

He said his greatest pleasure is seeing a newcomer to the sport develop their shooting skills. He recalled one student who was near tears, missing target after target. Then she found the mark. As the targets smashed apart in the sky, a broad smile lit up her face.

Target practice has been going on for generations in Stockton.

What would become the Stockton Trap & Skeet Club began when a group of gun owners gathered along Mosher Slough in 1947 to try their hand at trap shooting, according to a timeline of the club’s history.

By 1953, they rented 2 acres with an option to buy 33 more along Waterloo Road. There was not only a field for skeet and trap shooting, but courts set aside for the Italian lawn bowling game of bocce. One 1958 shooting exhibition at what was then the Stockton Waterloo Gun and Bocce Club drew a crowd of 500. Bocce enthusiasts stayed into the 1980s, when the club was split.

Today, there are multiple gun ranges and a snack bar where shooters can hang out and compare scores. The facility is managed by Dena Maahs, a Stockton resident who has worked there for 26 years doing everything from mowing the grass to keeping the books and driving a forklift.

“I love my job. That’s why I’ve stayed here so long,” she said.

After all, she added, “I’m a country girl at heart.”