The shooter pauses for a brief second, points his shotgun and pulls the trigger.
The clay disk, flying in the air at 40 mph, explodes into dust.
"It's like making your own fireworks," said Phillip Rowley, a 21-year-old mechanical engineering junior.
Rowley and two other UF students, 18-year-old aerospace and mechanical engineering freshman Alex Rennert and 23-year-old agronomy graduate student Leif Willey, created the university's first clay-target shooting team this semester.
At their first competition in Jacksonville on Saturday, the team, composed of Rennert, Rowley, Willey and a fourth member, 23-year-old geomatics senior Justin Thomas, won four awards. Ten collegiate teams, including UF, competed.
"If we had three more people, we would have been a really tough team to beat and could have won overall team," Rennert said.
A full team has five to seven members, depending on the competition.
"We're growing so rapidly by word of mouth, we're bound to get somebody who's going to want to compete," he said. "If you have an ounce of competitiveness in you, you're going to want to keep coming out."
Clay-target shooting is one of the fastest growing sporting competitions, according to the Association of College Unions International, which will host the Intercollegiate Clay Target Championships in San Antonio.
Clay-target shooting is comprised of three games: trap, skeet and sporting clays. There are American and international versions of trap and skeet. A single swinging machine is used in American trap shooting to shoot the disks in the air, and shooters move through five positions to hit the disks. Fifteen swinging machines are used in international trap.
In American skeet shooting, shooters stand in eight positions along a semicircle and aim at disks shot from two machines at different heights.
In international skeet, disks fly faster than American skeet, at about 62 mph, Rowley said.
Sporting clays is a combination of all the different forms.
The team competed in American skeet and trap shooting in Jacksonville.
Six weeks ago, Rowley, Willey and Rennert created the co-ed club, officially called the Florida Gators Trap, Skeet and Sporting Club. There are 106 email addresses on the club's mailing list and 15 to 17 regular members, including one or two women, who attend meetings and practice at the Gator Skeet and Trap Club, 5202 NE 46th Ave.
Willey, Rowley and Rennert were experienced shooters before they attended UF. Rowley was a member of Jacksonville University's shooting club, Willey was a member of Purdue University's shooting club as an undergraduate, and Rennert won about 20 U.S. shooting championships prior to college.
After learning there wasn't a shooting club at UF, Willey started an interest sign-up sheet in 2010 at the Gator Skeet and Trap Club range.
Rowley and Rennert contacted him at the beginning of this semester, and they began filing paperwork to formally create the club.
Each member pays $50 dues per semester to fund the group. Dues provide membership to Bradford Sportsmen's Farm and allow members to practice and receive coaching at Gator Skeet and Trap Club, open Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from noon to 6 p.m.
The club practices on Friday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from noon to 3 p.m.
Florida Gators Trap, Skeet and Sporting team member Justin Thomas, 23, competes in a shooting competition in Jacksonville on Saturday.
