by Gerri Peterson
“Mullen, Nebraska, Sharptail Shootout should be on the radar for anyone who enjoys upland hunting. The community is behind this event 100% and they are a shining example of what can be achieved when you set a goal and exceed it.”
This is part of what Tom Modin of Missouri had to say about the 2022 Sandhills Sharptail Shootout in September.
Since 1985 this event has been put on by the Mullen Commercial Club, requiring many volunteers and months of preparation before the event takes place every third weekend of September.
The first hunt was held October 4-6, 1985.
In the Sept. 5, 1985, issue of the “Hooker County Tribune,” hunt coordinator Roger Wittie was quoted as saying, “It takes a lot of time and foot work to put together the program we’ve scheduled.”
In 1985, a Sharptail team of hunters consisted of four members, and then a fifth member added by the Shootout committee. Since then the teams have consisted of five members when they register.
Forty hunters, eight guides and 15 landowners participated in the 1985 event. In 2022 the hunt was full with 100 hunters, 50 landowners, 27 guides and 20 scorekeepers.
Having the landowners who allow their land to be used is vital to this event. But so is having other community members who volunteer as guides and scorekeepers.
Zack Cox has been the hunt committee president for the past few years and said that the event requires “no less than 100 volunteers.”
“It starts with the ranchers and landowners, scorekeepers, guides, kitchen help, bartenders, firemen, Girl Scouts, committee members and their spouses, trap help, cooks, local business owners and staff, with several others helping wherever we need a hand,” Cox said. “Then you start adding all the hours put in by a lot of the volunteers like scouting for birds or people preparing meals and the hours really start adding up before the hunt.”
The past few years it has been harder for the hunt committee to find volunteers willing to commit to help guide and be scorekeepers, especially.
This past year Cox said they finally found enough volunteers at the last minute.
“Some of our scorekeepers drove over two hours and we also had a couple offer their help from Lincoln,” he said.
The volunteer effort the Sandhills Sharptail Shootout requires is not lost on the hunters who come into Mullen for the event. Cox said more than one of the hunters commented to him about it this year.
“I asked one of the hunters who has been coming for several years from a small southeastern Nebraska town what has made him come back and his response was, ‘You could never do this at home. Finding volunteer help would be impossible unless they all got something in return. No one at home comes together for just the community.’”
A new hunter also said something similar to Cox, “‘We would never be able to find enough honest people or enough landowners to volunteer their time and land. I have never seen so many honest and truly good people in one area, this is truly an amazing event.’”
In 1987 the Past Shooters organization formed with the goal to raise money to fund educational scholarships for Mullen High School students and local community projects, as well as assist with the hunt itself.
Since 1988 the Past Shooters have held an auction during the hunt, with the first scholarships given in 1989. According to Yvonne Andrews, Past Shooters secretary/treasurer, two scholarships were awarded for $250 each, then soon after they were $500 each, $750, then by 1996 $1,000 each.
“Starting in 2000 we gave three and since then sometimes we have given three, four, five, and even six if we had funds for that many,” Andrews said. “All together, to date, we've given 99 scholarships for $92,000.”
Past Shooters has also donated over $54,000 to various causes in the Mullen community - the gun club, the ambulance, swimming pool and courthouse parks, frisbee golf course, elementary playground, Lariat sound system, Hooker County Community Center, swimming pool, baseball field, Mullen Volunteer Fire Department, school hot lunch program and Mullen Marksmen National teams.
Between scholarships, community projects and helping out with the hunt in various ways, the Past Shooters’ auctions have donated back over $180,600.
The hunt committee also tries to order as much as they can locally for the event - from caps and koozies, to plaques, to landowner gifts, to food, to banquet placemats. And many organizations use aspects of the hunt as fundraisers - such as the National Honor Society cleaning birds the day of the hunt.
For many years the hunt committee has donated $500 per team to the Hooker County Community Foundation, averaging about $10,000 a year.
Of course there is also the local economic impact made by using the entire motel and local hosts for lodging and the influx of people other businesses in town see such as the gas station, restaurants and grocery store.
“Sometimes I think we forget about how large of a impact we have as a small town,” Cox said. “Starting with how much Sharptail means to so many people outside of our community. These hunters look forward to this week all year. I have had several people already ask me for the dates for next year so they could put in their days off and they won’t even know if their team is in the hunt until May.
I have heard over and over that it's not about the after hours or just seeing old friends, but the whole experience. Working their dogs in God’s country on wild birds or a sunrise over a hill range. Things we are used to and see every day, we sometimes forget that not everyone gets to experience.”