Most of the time, Morgan Thompson is your average 18-year-old girl, a cheerleader and prom queen and recent graduate of St. Augustine Catholic High School, smart, pretty and on her way to college, where she’ll soon settle into the rigors of daily life at Trinity University in San Antonio.
Full of lifelong memories, rigorous biochemistry studies and ... skeet shooting?
Thompson, after all, is just about the fastest draw in the West, a nationally ranked international skeet shooter, trained at the Tucson Trap and Skeet Club, a product of these mean streets. If this were the Wild West, she’d be a gunslinger. Annie Oakley might have had a run for her money.
• • •
This wild trip started roughly six years ago, when Morgan was 12 and wanted to go out hunting with her daddy.
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Evan Thompson had always been a hunter, but to properly teach his daughter technique and safety, he enrolled her in a scholastic clay-target program.
She was a crack shot from the start.
He soon got a phone call from some folks down at the TTSC, one of the premiere shooting clubs and ranges in the nation. They’d heard about the girl, not even a teenager, who had the eye of a marksman. Morgan met Emily Blount, a two-time world cup shooter, and found an idol. She practiced, practiced, practiced some more, showing a natural proclivity, and she won the first tournament she entered.
She was all in, and soon, too, were her parents, even if this came out of nowhere.
“I’m not a gun girl,” said her mother, Stephanie. “Nobody in my family hunted, not a clue. The learning curve has been straight up.”
But they still had a decision to make.
A good shotgun, one necessary to compete at the highest level of competition, can run into the mid-five-figures. This was going to take some debate, but Morgan just kept winning.
By the time she was 14, she was the best American skeet shooter for her age in the world, a champion in several competitions. Soon, she shifted to international skeet — otherwise known as Olympic Skeet — and she’s crept up in the rankings, as high as seventh in the country among all women.
Four years in, she’s already competing at the top. Four years from now, she could find herself in the Olympics.
Her coach, Lloyd Woodhouse, a six-time U.S. Olympic coach, and “probably the greatest clay shotgun coach ever,” says Evan Thompson, has told him that her technique is as good as anybody.
“In reality, it didn’t take me by surprise,” Evan said. “She is a pretty driven kid — I mean, you’ve got a kid who gets up every week in the summer, six days a week, so she has time to shoot. Never fails. While other kids were sleeping in until noon, she gets up and shoots.”
At St. Augustine, a school of only a couple hundred students, she’s gained respect among her peers.
Before her graduation this year, she was named to the team’s athletic hall of fame.
“I don’t think people realized how much work and effort I put into it,” she said. “What it takes.”
• • •
A lot of money, for one thing.
Her father has learned to be resourceful.
Evan bought a hydraulic shotgun shell reloader, realizing it was cheaper to reload than to buy new ones. The targets cost a bundle, too, though the family has developed a relationship with the TTSC that gets them a discount or two.
He’s no helicopter parent, living out his childhood sports fantasies through his kid, and this certainly hasn’t been a financial investment toward some athletic jackpot, like a parent who puts a kid in travel baseball with dreams of MLB payoffs coming some day.
“It’s not my drive, it’s not my athletic prowess — it’s really the function of a parent that kicks in,” he said. “You decide how much you’re willing to do. It was really difficult to get people to help. My wife and I sat down and decided, here’s what we’ll do. We’ve foregone retirement savings to support what our daughters do. The only sport that I know more expensive than this is equestrian.”
He wakes up every day around 4:30, long before his work begins as an attorney in Tucson, and he gets in a quick workout, and then he spends 45 minutes loading shells.
Until Morgan turned 18, either he or Stephanie would accompany her at the range, driving the 45 minutes there with her, standing behind her as she shot for two or three hours, and driving home.
This has become a labor of love.
“I was a shooter when she started but hadn’t shot for years, just hunted,” he said. “It’s been invaluable for me, and it isn’t the shooting part; it’s the relationship. It’s 45 minutes from our house to the range, and 45 back, and we spend all that time talking.”
Soon that’s going to end, though, and the nest will become a little emptier.
• • •
In just a handful of weeks, Morgan will be off to San Antonio to begin her new chapter.
She’s eager to join the lofty Trinity Trap and Skeet team, which has an established history, especially as shooting was such an individual pursuit for her in Tucson.
“I’m super-excited for that — I’m excited to shoot with other people,” she said. “There are some amazing shooters on the team, and they know what it’s like to dedicate their time to it.”
She’s going to have to carve out some time on her own, though, to focus on her own Olympic dreams.
At Trinity, she’ll have to shoot all the different disciplines, though she specializes and spends her own time shooting International Skeet.
In American Skeet shooting, the trap is released when the shooter has called for the target; in the international game, there is a random delay of zero to three seconds, and the gun most be drawn from mid-torso. It is a more complex and skillful version, akin to a golf swing and then a shot.
When she was 14, she switched to the international version, flying home after winning the junior and female categories at a competition in Sacramento and telling her parents that she was ready.
“That was the next logical step,” Stephanie said. “Most shooters don’t make that step because it’s so hard. If she didn’t want to, that would’ve been OK, too.”
Now the next step involves saying goodbye.
Theirs is a special relationship, a family bonded by parental dedication, not just to Morgan, but to her sister, an accomplished actress.
The Thompsons are ready to say goodbye to their daughter, knowing that she can handle herself — and her gun — pretty well.
“It’s bittersweet,” Evan said. “My philosophy is you can’t change time. Things are gonna happen in your life, and it’s just a function of it. It marches on. Do I want to see my oldest kid, one of my closest friends, leave the nest? No. But I’m excited for her. I’m excited she gets to experience all of it and I’m confident in who she is. I’m perfect.”
So, it seems, is Morgan.
