spotlight
QA
&
Rebecca
Wood
Outdoor
Women
Unlimited
16 | BLAZE | WINTER 2013
In the eight years since she founded
Outdoor Women Unlimited (OWU),
Rebecca Wood has watched her
organization grow from a single outdoor
skills class, held in central Alabama in
2005, to a group 5,000 women strong
and found in 38 states. Along the
way, Wood and her many dedicated
volunteers have learned a thing or two
about women and firearms, including
what it takes to bring females into the
shooting world.
How did you become involved in the
outdoor and firearms?
When I was a child, my family was a
really big fishing family. We fished
all the time! But my experiences with
firearms were really very few until I was
a senior in high school and met my
[now ex] husband. He and his whole
family were very involved in the shooting
sports. He was, and still is, such an
avid hunter. So he took me shooting
and hunting. He started me on a .410
OWU teaches women many other shotgun to get me familiar with shooting.
outdoors skills—archery, camp cooking Later, he taught both our children how
and kayaking to name but a few—but to shoot and hunt.
the shooting sports have become, in
many ways, the center of the group’s What was your first firearm?
activities. Wood, 58, is a mother of two
A Winchester 20 gauge pump shotgun.
adult children, a high school biology
I did a lot of target shooting and dove
teacher, and an avid shooter and
hunting with that shotgun.
hunter herself. Last season, she took
her biggest deer ever, a 200-inch nontypical whitetail in Indiana, on an OWUsponsored muzzleloader hunt.
Accept No Limits | outdoorwomenunlimited.org