Two years ago Jamie Riggs convinced her mother to let her participate in a Quail Unlimited Youth Camp held near her home of Nashville, Tenn. Without knowing it at the time, the fateful event put her on the fast track to the upcoming ESPN Great Outdoor Games presented by Dodge.

Besides learning about conservation and basic outdoor skills, the QU campers were taught basic shotgunning and the fundamentals of sporting clays. Riggs, a vivacious 16 year old and a natural competitor, picked up a shotgun for the first time and proceeded to shatter the clay targets in front of the predominantly (and much chagrined) male teenage audience. The weeklong camp concluded with an informal sporting clays competition. To hear her recount the fateful event you'd think she's already struck gold at the Great Outdoor Games Target Sports Shotgun Event.

"I blew them all away and it was just awesome," recounts Riggs, now 18 and the defending U.S. Junior Ladies Champion from the Sporting Clays National Championship (also her first SCNC competition). "There I was, the only girl in camp, and I hit every target in front of these guys."

Shortly after the camp she had a revelation. Riggs' father Jim is a member of the Nashville Gun Club, also home base for the Tennessee Clay Target Complex. She began joining him on trips to the club as a spectator and developed envy for the male dominance over women at the five-stand course.

"I told my dad, 'I can do this,'" she says. "I just love the concept of girls beating guys at something they think they can do better than us."

Riggs, an incoming senior at Brentwood Academy, where sports are high on the list along with academics, is on the varsity tennis team and excels at team sports ranging from basketball to soccer and baseball. But sporting clays is now her first love.

"I am obsessed with this and could do it for the rest of my life," she declares. And it's her "I can do this" attitude that has propelled her into the limelight of sporting clays competitions.

At an event held recently in Montgomery, Ala., Riggs took one of the top shooters-former national champion Tres Sides-into several extra rounds before falling by just one target. The two Great Outdoor Games qualifiers reached the point that double targets were coming every two seconds.

"She's going to wear some folks out, I can tell you that right now," says Sides, the 2002 silver medallist whose resume also includes a U.S. Sporting Clays championship title in 1997 and is a seven-time Alabama state champ. "She is practicing every day and it's going to be hard to beat her. I hope I don't draw her first."

After watching last year's telecast of the Great Outdoor Games, Riggs directed the same determined proclamation she made to her father to her coach, Wendell Cherry, who happens to be the 1999 SCA National Champion.

"I told him 'I can do this,'" she says. "He told me that it's not as easy at it looks." For the first and only time, Riggs ignored her coach's advice and will be packing her Beretta 391 Sporting Model for Reno.

"It will be such an adrenaline rush," says the now excited and wide-eyed teenager. "I can't wait. I've already been thinking over my strategy."

Look out boys, here she comes.