HILLSDALE — When Easton Henson was in preschool, his teacher discovered there are color shades he can’t tell apart. Now a rising seventh grader at Jonesville Middle School, Easton has adapted well, and his parents didn’t think to mention it when he joined the Halter Clay Crushers shotgun team this past season.
After they brought it up one night at practice, head coach Matt Weaver suspected it might be harder for Easton to track the brightly colored flying targets. He started asking Easton about what colors he could and couldn’t see.
When he asked Easton about the color of a nearby port-a-potty, Easton couldn’t tell for sure. He knew it was a shade of blue.
Then Weaver handed Easton a pair of his daughter’s tinted shooting glasses.
“Here, try these out.” Easton put them on.
“It’s blue,” Easton said.
“What color shirt is your dad wearing?”
“That’s blue,” Easton replied — and it was.
“The colors were vibrant, and he just broke down,” said Easton’s dad, Travis Henson. “We knew we had to do something.”
Easton started borrowing the glasses for practice. In the shotgun disciplines the team shoots, athletes have 25 shells per round and score a point for each one that hits a target. Easton’s dad said that some athletes on the team competed for several years before shooting their 25.
“His very first time he shot, he was only averaging about 11-13 a round,” Travis Henson said. “Once he got his glasses, he shot 24.”
The problem? The tinted shooting glasses Easton needed could cost upwards of a thousand dollars, depending on the brand.
“They’re very expensive. I mean, you could have $1,000-2,000 in a pair of glasses,” his dad said. “We struggled with that.”
One night at a baseball game, Easton’s parents mentioned the situation to Jason Sellers, whose son plays on the same baseball team as Easton. Sellers works as the maintenance and grounds manager at Hillsdale College’s John Anthony Halter Shooting Sports Education Center, the home of the Halter Clay Crushers.
Unbeknownst to the Hensons, Sellers brought it up to another Halter Center employee, Ashleigh Peterson, who brought it up to Halter Center Director Matt Little.
“We just came to practice one night, and they’re like, ‘Hey Easton, come over here.’ And they were waiting for him with some glasses,” said Easton’s mom, Nikki Henson.
The Halter Center regularly stocks and sells RE Ranger Eyewear shooting glasses. Little had Easton come in and try some on until they found the perfect match: Derrick Mein Signature Series Falcon Pro lenses. Little gave a pair to Easton, and RE Ranger agreed to supply them for free.
“We knew exactly what to do when we heard about Easton’s situation,” said Sean Dowd from Ranger. “We are glad to have been able to help another young shooting sports athlete advance in the sport.”
“We had no idea,” Easton’s mom said. “We are very thankful, very humbled, that all of this happened the way it has.”
After just his first year on the team, Easton now consistently scores around 20, and he plans to keep shooting. He also competes on the Jonesville High School trap team, but his family said the Clay Crushers are different.
“The team’s like not even your team,” Easton said. “It’s basically all your friends. They are my family.”
The Clay Crushers are a Scholastic Clay Target Program team, competing in various shotgun disciplines such as trap, skeet, and sporting clays. They practice at Hillsdale’s John Anthony Halter Shooting Sports Education Center, a world-class shooting facility that is also home to the USA Shooting National Team. The team is open to shooters of all experience levels up to 20 years of age. Interested community members can email halterclaycrushers@gmail.com. The Clay Crushers travel around Southwest Michigan to compete against some of the other SCTP teams in the region.
At the SCTP nationals last month, Weaver said Easton shot some of his highest scores yet. He hopes to compete at a higher level someday.
“I definitely want to keep going with the sport,” Easton said. “I haven’t gotten my 25 yet, so I’m hoping to get that. I’ve got a 24, but I’m hoping to get a 50, maybe even 100 straight.”
This article originally appeared on Hillsdale Daily News: Hillsdale’s Halter Center helps Jonesville shooting sports athlete see — and succeed
Reporting by Provided by Hillsdale College / Hillsdale Daily News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
