FAIRHOPE, Ala. — Some young men his age might play football, or try out for the baseball team. Harley Terry, a 13-year-old Fairhope Middle School student, has played baseball and enjoys most sports, but has found his niche in a pastime with a little more kick.

Skeet shooting is Terry’s passion, and the teen is quite good at it, having won six gold and seven silver medals in the 2008 Alabama State Skeet Shoot. The competition was held earlier this month at the Red Eagle Skeet and Trap Club in Childersburg. He hit 470 out of 500 flying targets during the three-day event, in the 12-gauge, 20-gauge, 28-gauge and 410 categories.

Terry credits Neal Green, who helped tremendously when he first started shooting skeet less than three years ago. He also praises his dad, Buck Terry, a former skeet shooter, as well as his current coach, Jeff Brown of the Styx River Range and Gun Club in Robertsdale, where he practices his shotgun skills.

“I used to shoot rifles, and always used to ask my dad if I could shoot skeet with him,” said Terry. “Sometimes they can be hard to shoot. It’s not that easy.”

Hitting clay targets sailing through the air at a rapid clip requires one to be focused, according to Terry. He said, “You can’t be afraid of shooting a gun, of course. It takes a lot of practice.”

Information provided by the National Skeet Shooting Association says “skeet differs from all other shooting sports, because it was originally developed to improve hunting in the field, and only later, because of its growing popularity, developed into a competitive sport.”

It sprung from the industrial revolution that swept the country in the early 1900s, when rural areas were gobbled up by sprawl, and areas for hunting became scarce as game became harder to find. Game seasons and bag limits were enacted to spur conservation.

Hunters fine-tuned their skills by shooting skeet, but it wasn’t the same because they could only shoot from one angle. Charles Davis of Andover, Mass. solved the problem in 1920 by introducing a 50-yard shooting circle, which he called “Shooting Around the Clock.”

The idea featured 12 stations, with shooters firing two shots from each station and one from the center, equaling a box of 25 shells. It worked well at the time because it provided almost every type of shot a hunter might encounter.

When the owner of adjoining property complained of shot falling on his land, Davis cut the circle in half and put a second trap at the end of the shooting field, giving birth to the modern skeet field. Skeet is the Scandinavian word for “shoot.”

Terry said eight shooting stations now make up a regulation skeet field. One trap throws targets from a position 10 feet off the ground, but they reach 15 feet by the time they cross the center of the field. The second trap releases targets just 3 1/2 feet from the ground, but the clay pigeon also rises to 15 feet before it reaches the field’s center.

A shooter moves from station to station, and shoots a round of 25 targets. Seventeen are singles and eight are doubles.

“There’s two different kinds of skeet — American Skeet, where you tell them to pull the bird and International Skeet where they have three seconds after you say ‘pull,’” Terry said. He added he just began practicing International, and is also training for the National Junior Olympics Team, which he hopes to join when he turns 14.

Terry said, “I’m actually doing pretty good.”

The young man practices shooting each Thursday after school, and takes in a few rounds on weekends. He said although the Beretta 682 Super Skeet Edition he uses includes a Precision-Fit recoil system to reduce kick, he usually needs to take a break after shooting two full rounds (50 targets, 16 stations). He averages 2,000 rounds each month.

Terry also shoots competitively at the Styx River facility, his home club, which he proclaimed is “the nicest range around these parts.”

A July competition also staged in Childersburg — the Heart of Dixie Shoot — not only earned him honors, it caught the attention of a reporter from the Daily Home newspaper, which covers the Talladega, Pell City and Sylacauga area. She featured Terry in a story about the match in which he shot 89 of 100 targets with a 12-gauge shotgun, and 86 of 100 targets with a 20-gauge shotgun.

The hard work (if something one enjoys can actually be called work) doesn’t seem to interrupt his studies. Terry said English is his favorite subject and, as you might imagine, the seventh-grader has written about skeet shooting for a class assignment.

Skeet isn’t all Terry shoots, however.

“I like hunting, mainly dove, rabbit and squirrel — small game animals,” he said. “I do get my BB gun out and shoot dove in my backyard. I like (to eat) dove and squirrel, not the little gray squirrel, but the big fox squirrel.”