By Emmie Boese
Clay target, archery, and fishing teams are fairly popular amongst Kansas high schools, but not all high schools have all three teams.
Bluestem High School is a small high school, but those that don’t know Bluestem would be surprised to learn the size of their outdoors team. They have a fishing team, clay target team, and archery team. The fishing team has 10 members, the clay target team has 21, while the archery team has 15 to 20 members. They compete in several surrounding states like Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma and Alabama. They are led by head coach Darren Jackson who also serves as the schools resource officer.
Bluestem is known to not only have a top-notch outdoors program that competes at a high level, but quality facilities and tools for their teams to use. Athletic Director Nick Barnes described what the quality of the outdoors program brings to the school.
“We are very unique at Bluestem as we have a fishing team, archery team, and clay target team,” Barnes said. “We currently have three district-owned bass boats. Our sponsor, Darren Jackson, travels to different states with this group so they can compete.”
The teams have had their fair share of accomplishments. One of those accomplishments is the fishing team making it to the world finals last season.
[We went to the] “high school world finals in Alabama made the top 60 out of 384,” Jackson said. “The top two kids from won a $100,000 scholarship.”
With any sport in high school, you usually have to try out for a team. What also makes the outdoors team at Bluestem unique is that anyone can come out for the outdoors teams. Jackson usually has a meeting before the season starts to invite all students who are interested to come out.
“Anybody that wants to join we will take them whether they have experience or not,” Jackson said.
What Jackson enjoys most about coaching the outdoors team is giving students the opportunity to be a part of a team and finding something that they will enjoy.
“Getting the kids involved and letting them be a part of something,” Jackson said.
