Ellington

At the time of year when many high school seniors try to get by with the bare minimum, Matt Massingill, 18, does not seem to be suffering from "senior-itis." As a service requirement for his senior project at Northwest Rankin High School, Massingill had to raise $500 for wetlands conservation, but he didn't stop there. Massingill raised $1,100 through a charity golf tournament, and donated it to Ducks Unlimited, a wetlands and waterfowl conservation organization.

Massingill cites the disappearance of wetlands as his reason for going beyond the minimum requirement. "I've spent a lot of time in the wetlands, and I've realized that they're just not around like they used to be," he says, in a conference room at his father's subcontracting firm near Grants Ferry Road. "A good friend of mine has a duck camp in Tallahatchie County in the Delta. … They flood that land every year, and they couldn't keep flooding this one area where we were doing a lot of our hunting. So we lost all that land."

Massingill, a Flowood native, began advertising his tournament in December at golf courses and through friends and family, ultimately attracting teams from as far away as Carthage and Philadelphia. The tournament, held in March, was set up as a "four-man scramble."

"There (are) four players to a team, and you take the best ball out of the four shots," he explains. Massingill was able to play, too, on a team with his friends, but admits they didn't play well. "We were just out there having a good time. … It was a lot of fun to see all the other people enjoying the tournament," he says.

The project was an opportunity to combine two of his passions: duck hunting and golf. Massingill has been an avid golfer for as long as he can remember and a member of Northwest Rankin's golf team since the eighth grade. He says he has been duck hunting since he was 7 or 8 years old. "I just fell into it," he says.

Massingill will attend Mississippi State University this fall, and plans to study construction management and land development. When I ask him why he wants to study those fields, Massingill gestures to his father's offices at Associated Architectural Products, and says, "This—this business." His ultimate goal, he says, is to come back and work for his father's firm.

Massingill is equally determined to remain involved with Ducks Unlimited. He hopes to make the tournament an annual fund raiser. "I would love to do that," he says. "It's a lot to organize for one person, but it was fun seeing it come together.