Bentley Ferguson never showed interest in one of his grandfather’s biggest passions until after “Pops” died in the summer of 2021.

Stephen Imes was quite adept in helice, a form of skeet shooting where instead of moving in a traditional arc, the targets are designed to dart off in unpredictable directions to mimic the flight of birds. Imes, who discovered the sport in Birmingham, Ala., helped build a helice ring at Prairie Wildlife in West Point. Although his grandson never accompanied him in competitive shooting before his death at 68, Ferguson was inspired and began to take up helice soon thereafter.

It did not take long for Ferguson to realize he had inherited Imes’ skill. Just two years after he started shooting, Ferguson finished tied for 11th place at the junior world championships in Córdoba, Argentina, last month.

“I wish I started a little sooner,” said Ferguson, a 17-year-old Columbus resident and a junior at Heritage Academy. “I wasn’t too good at first, but it was something that challenged me. My grandfather had a memorial tournament for him, so I was practicing a little bit before that. That’s where it started.”

Ferguson soon began competing throughout the South as well as in a national tournament in California. Just like in traditional skeet shooting, the shooter signals for the target to be launched into the air, but while skeet targets are typically simple discs, helice targets have a fan on either side to resemble birds’ wings.

“There are five boxes that are lined up in front of you, 26 meters away,” Ferguson said. “You don’t want to guess which box it’s coming out of, so you aim at the center one, and you’ll see it and then move your gun to it and shoot it.”

Other area competitor

The Prairie Wildlife helice ring has become a training ground for young shooters from all over the Golden Triangle. Garrett Vaughan, also of Columbus, became acquainted with Imes when his father did some work for him, and Imes became Vaughan’s mentor in the sport. Now a freshman at Mississippi State University, Vaughan finished tied for 10th at the junior world championships in 2022 held in Messina, on the island of Sicily in southern Italy.

Vaughan, an experienced skeet shooter, became attracted to helice in 2019 because traditional skeet had grown repetitive for him.

“Skeet targets are in a near-perfect line,” Vaughan said. “They don’t change in direction, the wind doesn’t really affect them, the whole target is made of one material. As opposed to helice, when you have that brittle orange plastic and the hard white plastic. It’s really harder to break that target as opposed to a normal clay target. You have to think about what the wind is doing to the target and the direction it was launched.”

Like Ferguson, Vaughan competed in tournaments in Louisiana and Texas, in addition to monthly tournaments at Prairie Wildlife. He had planned to make his world championships debut in 2021 in Cairo, Egypt, but opted to stay home due to COVID-19 concerns.

Prior to arriving in Italy, Vaughn estimated that he knew 30 or 40 people who shot helice, so being around several hundred helice shooters was a new experience.

“It was really amazing because it’s a niche sport,” Vaughn said. “Everyone there spoke different languages and I met very different people from the United Kingdom and Argentina. Sicily is a very pretty countryside, and we were on a mountain shooting the sport.”

Side by side shooting

Ferguson, following in his grandfather’s footsteps, used the more unusual side-by-side shotgun, with the two barrels next to each other horizontally rather than one on top of the other. The over-under technique is far more common because shots are less likely to drift off to the side. Just one other competitor in Argentina was also a side-by-side shooter, and Ferguson said the two formed a bond during the event.

With his first world championships under his belt, Ferguson now plans to incorporate even more elements of his grandfather’s technique. He currently starts with the gun already mounted on his shoulder, but his goal is to prepare to shoot the way Imes did by starting with the gun at his waist and only raising it to his shoulder after calling for the target.

“I’m not sure where it’ll take me,” Ferguson said. “I’m enjoying it right now.”