Youth Shoot-Out Winner Cashes In On Grand Prizes

After gearing up at Adventure Outdoors, John Kilpatrick cashed in on a deer hunt with Woods-N-Water last December.

Even if there was such a thing as a cookie-cutter whitetail hunt, it likely wouldn’t be a whole lot of fun. But they’re nearly always different, each its own. And sometimes, you just gotta take a break to make things work out.

Ask John Kilpatrick, of Thomaston.

Setbacks seem to crouch in the shadows for this 16-year-old (17 next month) Upson County youngster, who butts up against challenges, then soldiers on. It’s not easy making one’s way into the Georgia Outdoor News Youth Big-Buck Contest Shoot-Out by being a weekly winner with the highest-scoring buck of that particular week. It’s even harder to come out on top at the end, shooting against other weekly winners with a BB gun, targets ranging from full-size skeet to mini Nilla wafers to Rolaids tablets. It took six rounds in 2024!

But let’s go back to the deer that got him here.

The 2023 season was rolling by quickly, and while there was really nothing special in the air that Dec. 5 morning, John knew the buck was around. Somewhere. And it’s hard enough for a veteran hunter to perch in a blind off and on for weeks, waiting out a single animal; but a 15-year-old?

John is a young man of very few words. So we’ll let his dad, John Shaw, tell the tale.

“The blind is not very far from the house, and John sat for a while, then decided to ease up to the house for a few minutes, then go hunt some more.”

What nobody knew was that the buck had also been on break, and decided to clock back in a couple of minutes after the blind was vacated.

Shaw continues.

“The blind was on a hill, there was another hill about 100 yards away, and the deer was standing on it! There’s a valley between the two, and John had to sneak back to the blind, get his rifle and make the shot.”

The Savage Axis .308 did the trick, and the 105-inch 8-pointer hit the ground. Kilpatrick was Shoot-Out bound.

Here’s the buck that got John to the Youth Shoot-Out last July. He killed it in 2023 in Upson County.

Which came with its own set of problems.

Kilpatrick suffers from a rare eye condition known as Duane syndrome—also Duane’s syndrome or Duane retraction syndrome—which is basically a misalignment of the eyes. Movement of the affected orb is limited in certain directions, and it also causes the eyelid in the affected eye to droop. What all that means to John is that as long as he’s shooting the Savage—with its scope—there’s no problem.

But peep sights on the Daisy 499B Champion BB gun used in the Shoot-Out? Different story.

It’s the same gun used in 4-H competitions across the country, selected so that it’s fair across the board for all Shoot-Out competitors. Duane syndrome, however, is not fair.

I don’t want to tell you more than you want to know, but research says that it’s more likely for the left eye to be affected than the right. Why?

Nobody knows.

John Kilpatrick? Right eye.

“Duane syndrome causes his right eye to droop, and there’s not a lot of movement,” Shaw relates. “When he shoots with a scope, he’s fine, but with peep sights, every time he tried to practice, his eye would close.”

Tough luck, right? Easy to chalk it up to, “I did my best and things just didn’t work out…”

But that’s not the way John Kilpatrick goes at life.

“So,” Dad says, “he got out in the yard and taught himself to shoot left-handed.”

Yep. Easy as that. And remember this: he was the only Shoot-Out competitor to hit a mini Nilla wafer at 25 feet.

Left-handed.

The win resulted in a $3,000 shopping spree at Adventure Outdoors and a dream deer hunt with Woods-N-Water Outfitters at their Johnson County location.

Kilpatrick left Adventure Outdoors packing some serious heat: a Glock 43X MOS in 9 mm; a Savage bolt-action 17 HMR rifle; and a Stoeger 20-gauge semi-auto turkey special, plus binoculars and “tons of ammo…”

The list goes on, because hard work pays off.

And then it was on to Johnson County and a weekend with class-act, head honcho Blaine Burley and the boys at Woods-N-Water.

“I love doing things with kids, getting them involved in the outdoors,” Blaine said. “We do camps, hog, deer and  turkey hunts, artifact adventure camps, all kinds of stuff. Getting them involved in the outdoors and getting them involved in hunting and fishing are things they’ll enjoy for the rest of their lives. It’s a great thing y’all at GON do with kids, as separate from adults, with the Youth Shoot-Out. We’ve been involved in it for eight or 10 years now.”

The Johnson County tract of Woods-N-Water is a half-hour from my home, so I got to spend some time with the two Johns the first weekend of December last year.

Inside.

“It was a pretty slow weekend, but it was actually a very cold weekend,” Shaw ruefully recalls. “We saw a couple of buttonheads, but that was about it. The deer just shut down. But I think that weekend was really good. I enjoyed it, and John did an awful lot of fishing in the pond there. He caught quite a few bass, bream and catfish and some crappie, as well, between hunts.”

The pair shared a blind on each hunt, and I think the deer were probably huddled up together somewhere, as well. The cold that weekend was no joke.

Blaine, who has hunted and fished for just about everything out there, summed things up perfectly.

“When you have short journeys like this, kids really enjoy getting away to a new place. They hunt with dad or someone else back home, but they really enjoy getting away to a new place. We’ve had a lot of opportunities and success here, but it’s not all about the kill. Kids seem to really enjoy getting outdoors with their parent or chaperone, and there’s a big benefit to that quality time. But most have never had an experience like this. We feel like it’s a good cause overall to promote this future generation coming up.”

Kilpatrick has been invited back, but as his dad said, “We usually do six or seven deer a year, but last year I had to get a new freezer!”

And with all those new guns and the ammo to go with them, nobody in the clan is going hungry any time soon.

Oh, yeah. Those setbacks I mentioned? There’s one more Shaw told me about.

“John was in a fire the second week of February, standing near a burn barrel in the backyard when it blew up in his face. Somebody had put a spray paint can in there, and we didn’t know it. It knocked him down, but his brother was standing nearby and helped get him up and away from there. John was in intensive care for two and a half days with second-degree burns on his face. It’s like a miracle, but he has absolutely no scars! There was no surgery; at the hospital, they came in and applied stem cell grafts to his face, and they really did their job. It was amazing stuff.”

Tough kid. And I hope he comes back to Woods-N-Water. Good guy to hang out with.