THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 23, 1996 TAG: 9607230373
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C3 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: TOM ROBINSON
LENGTH: 84 lines
One of the few places beyond the duck blind where shotguns are generally welcome these days are at the Olympics. So if it's Games-time and a shotgun is involved, Lloyd Woodhouse must be nearby.
As coach of the U.S. shooting team's 10-person shotgun brigade, Woodhouse, who grew up in Norfolk, wishes that were different. For one, better publicity for the gun might deepen the pool of talent he has to draw from. It also would fatten his budget.
``We're struggling right now to learn how to raise money,'' Woodhouse said Monday after a practice session at the Wolf Creek shooting complex in College Park, Ga., the Olympic shooting venue. ``We have some bright young people getting involved in fund raising.''
They were needed after the U.S. Olympic Committee ousted the National Rifle Association as shooting's governing body a couple years ago following alleged violations of the Amateur Sports Act of 1978. That's made the current organization, USA Shooting, scramble to fill a hole of more than $2 million that the NRA provided.
Meet Woodhouse, though, and you meet a relaxed, chatty 61-year-old who leaves the money concerns to someone else. Especially here, his third Olympics in his 11th year as coach, where his only worry is keeping his shooters sharp.
So far, so good. Two of his three male trap shooters have already won silver and bronze medals by hitting most of their 125 targets over a two-day session. They were the first Olympic medals won by Woodhouse-coached gunners.
Today, his women's double trap team, featuring a 17-year deadeye from Southern California named Kim Rhode, blasts away. Wednesday, the men's double-trappers do the same.
And Friday and Saturday, three men's shooters, led by Air Force fighter pilot Bill Roy, close the competition by gunning for 125 pesky skeet - which cross in front of the shooters, as opposed to trap, in which targets sail away.
The U.S. is up there with the Italians and Germans among the world's best shotgun slingers. Woodhouse leaves it to others to say that. What he does say is ``my programs, I know, are working.'' The proof is in the smithereens of so many four-inch clay spheres.
Woodhouse, who graduated in 1955 with the first class out of the current Norview High School, founded a junior Olympic team three years ago that has already paid off in Rhode and two Olympic alternates. And through a year-long qualifying process, the U.S. and Italy were the only teams to earn the maximum 10 Olympic shotgun slots.
If Woodhouse would take credit, he'd have to admit it's something an old Princess Anne County duck hunter can be proud of.
A former Air Force enlistee who specialized in teaching missile control systems, Woodhouse climbed to chief master sergeant over a 30-year career that ended in 1985. He didn't bag his first skeet - ``There's no season on 'em,'' he said - until 1963, but soon was winning state championships.
Woodhouse wound up running an Air Force skeet team out of San Antonio, Texas and was asked to become the national team's first full-time paid coach in '85, not long after he lost his 23-year-old son, David, to a rare immune-system deficiency.
So Woodhouse packed up his wife Bobbie and daughters Ellen and Deborah, now 31 and 23, respectively, and settled into Colorado Springs, Colo., USA Shooting's home.
Not that South Hampton Roads has been absent the Woodhouse name since Lloyd left in '55. Woodhouse's mother, Bea, brothers Milton and Nelson and sister Martha all live in the area where Lloyd once was known as an outstanding football, basketball and track man.
Now that his shooters have gathered that same reputation internationally, Woodhouse would love to see his sport shake the gun-nut image that has kept companies outside the gun industry from becoming sponsors.
USA Shooting's public-relations firm recently surveyed shooters across the country. They found they're a Coke-drinking, Chevy-pickup driving bunch, the better to tap into those corporate dollars.
If that happens, Woodhouse's crew could have the most to do with it.
In his junior program, Woodhouse accepts only ``good citizens'' - no scattershots, or scatterbrains, need apply. He has the fresh-faced Rhode, who schmoozed with Jay Leno in June. And then there is Roy, a totally too-good-to-be-true, 37-year-old teacher of boy scouts, Sunday school, English literature and fighter pilots.
Better still, Rhode and Roy are medal possibilities. Or in short, the very best kind of straight shooters a guy like Woodhouse could ask for. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Lloyd Woodhouse, coach of the U.S. shooting team's 10-person shotgun
brigade, graduated in 1955 in Norfolk with the first class out of
the current Norview High School.
KEYWORDS: OLYMPIC GAMES 1996 by CNB