Southern Girls are Makin’ Reality TV Real
Reality TV is anything but real. It’s often scripted to the point that it’s no different than any other show in television – except the writing isn’t as good. Ashley and Danielle say that “Southern Girls Got Game” will be different because you’ll see them succeed in a hunt, but you’ll also see them fail. You may also see Danielle’s dad Kenny in his underwear brandishing a .357 (Kenny will have to tell you all of the details himself…unless somebody says the magic words to us).
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KENNY: Tell where y’all have been.
DANIELLE: Where we’re hunting or any other places…
KENNY: Where the show has took you to.
DANIELLE: Well, we’ve been to Iowa, Ohio. We’ve been to Kentucky, Alaska.
TRINA: What did y’all bag in each of those places?
DANIELLE: Deer, turkey, bear.
TRINA: Hogs.
DANIELLE: Yeah, and hogs.
ASHLEY: Those are our four things that we have taken in those states.
KENNY: They’ve been to Florida.
TRINA: Oklahoma.
ASHLEY: Alabama, Oklahoma, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alaska, Iowa, Ohio. I know we’re repeating it but we’re just trying to touch all the points.
What are your favorite things to hunt recreationally. Let’s say the cameras are off and you’re just going out to hunt. What’s your favorite thing to hunt for?
ASHLEY: Hippo (laughing). Sorry.
DANIELLE: I know this really off subject, but it was raining one night and it was like a month after we met each other. We both agreed that we had to kill a hippo before the show starts…that’s probably not going to happen but we tag-team on everyone that’s in the truck, like 5 or 6 other people and we hold arms like this and we run around this huge parking lot screaming that we’re going to kill a hippo.
KENNY: Really. What is your favorite animal to kill?
DANIELLE: Mine is turkey…and deer.
ASHLEY: In this state?
Anywhere.
ASHLEY: Anywhere? Gators. Gators. That’s where I started before I ever knew how to shoot a bow and that’s where I’ll end…when I can’t pull back my bow any more.
DANIELLE: But she won’t kill just any gator, it has to be over 10 foot…8 foot, is what you said, 8 foot.
ASHLEY: I caught a lot of gators. I grew up in the Everglades. I’m going gator hunting back in Florida soon, so I’ll be in my hometown when I do it.
Well, you won’t be in your hometown hunting gator unless your hometown has something going on we need to be concerned about.
ASHLEY: Well, you know what I mean. Home state. Home STATE. Sorry, I get so…
TRINA: And I’ll just say this, too. One thing about their show, it’s not like it is all serious hunting.
DANIELLE: We make everything fun. You can ask my mother.
KENNY: We film just about everything and it may be something stupid happening at the grocery store. It may be somebody tripping everywhere they go or falling on their face. I mean there’s a lot of episodes that’s gonna have… We’re going to try to put those funny parts in the show.
That’s what’s going to add to that reality.
KENNY: And one thing we’re trying to say…they are, on the reality part of it, Ashley stated that they are trying to learn. They’re doing everything. They’re doing their food pots, they’re doing their stand placements, they pick everything. We might go to the plantation or we might go to an outfitter, whatever but when it is all said and done, we tell the outfitter up front that invites them, they want to pick what they hunt. Like we went to Alaska. We did a lot of picking. We ended up hunting the last 3 days by ourselves without the outfitters and we got our bears. That’s one thing they’re learning.
DANIELLE: Five minutes before…
KENNY: I had 5 minutes left to kill it and I got my bear. You hear that a lot. You think “Oh, yeah, really.” But that’s really what happened. She got hers. I wanted them to get theirs then…
DANIELLE: And the best part, and this is really weird, we were listening to Britney Spears all 3 times we shot our bears. The same song all 3 times we shot our bears.
TRINA: And you all had on a pink necklace.
DANIELLE: Yeah, my pink necklace and bracelet.
So you’re a big Britney Spears fan, are you, Kenny?
KENNY: No, I’m more of…
DANIELLE: But he did wear a pink….
KENNY: We have a friend that we met at Hunting for a Cure. He makes handmade necklaces and he had made them a bear necklace and a bracelet and all that. So they both had them on. When Danielle killed hers she had Ashley’s, or one of them’s bracelets on…
DANIELLE: Ashley had mine and then you had mine.
KENNY: Whatever, then so when it was getting close into mine, they said “Dad, put on the necklace and the bracelet.” I said “I don’t care if that’s what it takes.” They put a pink necklace on me and a pink bracelet on me. We went around the corner and there’s my bear. He shot up the hill and he made the fatal mistake of stopping.
TRINA: He told him it would bring them luck and it did.
KENNY: That’s one thing they do a lot of. They donate time going for the kids and for breast cancer. We’ve already been to 2 Hunting for a Cure events, and we’ve got 2 more coming up this year for St. Jude’s.
ASHLEY: I’m sure more will come up…
KENNY: And they will.
We have a lot of last-minute scheduling that we’re like “Hey, this is a good cause. We’re going to do it.” Whether it makes the show or not, it doesn’t matter at that point. It’s not about just getting footage for the show.
How does that work in for school for you?
DANIELLE: I’m home-schooled. I can do…I usually work ahead.
TRINA: Actually, she’s virtual.
Obviously, hunting for sport and hunting for TV are 2 totally different things. You kind of touched on it a minute ago when you go out and you won’t get anything. How long will you schedule a hunt? Are you going to be there until you bag what you want to bag or are we going to see the failures, too?
DANIELLE: Yes, if we go…great example, Florida, we went to Florida to go hunt for turkeys in Osceola County. We went there and we had plenty of opportunities to kill anything, like jakes but me and her were really looking forward to doing a grand slam so we didn’t kill any jakes so we let everything pass us by but it doesn’t matter…
ASHLEY: I missed 2 birds in Florida.
DANIELLE: I wasn’t going to say that, but…
KENNY: That was part of the show, though.
ASHLEY: I missed 2 birds in Florida and I wanted to get my first turkey ever with my bow, and I did.
KENNY: And let me elaborate on that for her. Hunting with a bow for turkey is extremely hard. And she had it set in her mind that she was going to do it and she did miss twice but then she did get her first bird.
Hitting anything with a bow is an added challenge.
KENNY: A turkey’s a lot harder, though, because turkeys are so fidgety. They are so…their eyesight is so good.
TRINA: They can take off so quickly.
DANIELLE: They can, and they can fly. But it’s a good thing I’m a skeet shooter so I can shoot in the air.
KENNY: Anyway, finish telling it.
DANIELLE: Well, we left and we stayed there just as long as we planned and we left with no turkeys bagged but it was still fun because we got to learn about these turkeys because there’s so much different from our turkeys here in South Carolina. They’re way different.
TRINA: They’re more skittish, too, aren’t they?
DANIELLE: They’re way more skittish and they’re smaller than our turkeys.
Really?
DANIELLE: Yeah. Right?
KENNY: To a degree, some of the bigger ones…but the average that we saw was smaller than our birds. But we did see some big ones.
Have they set a premier date for the show yet? It’s Fox SportsSouth, right?
KENNY: We’ve been in touch with him all day today and we should know something by the end of this week about whether it’s going to be the 1st, 2nd or 3rd quarter because they’re filling up so quick, they’re trying to get us the best date they can.
ASHLEY: We have some awesome sponsors and they’ve become our family, too, people that we can really, really depend on. The Cow Blind, Dead End Game Calls, Fish Stalker Lures, Just for Does, Monster Rod Holders, PSE Archery, Realtree, Watson Airlock, The Wright Blind, Wyoming Machinery.
You touched on something a second ago I want to make sure we hit because we’ve talked a lot about hunting but apparently there’s going to be a fishing component at some point.
DANIELLE: I’ve had Fish Stalker Lures since I was little. That’s where I made my first spinner bait for Susan Komen Breast Cancer, but Fish Stalker Lures is what we use for bass fishing, crappie fishing, stripers and all that…but they actually have the #1 crappie jigs in the crappie world.
KENNY: They recently did their first pro catfishing tournament in Alabama. They were the headliners for it, and they were absolutely a hit. They making them the faces of the catfishing world. You can look back on the …the first female and the only female to ever compete in Bass Masters in South Carolina. She was ESPN Bass Magazine but now her and Ashley are going to be doing a lot more fishing. That’s going to be big component of the show.
DANIELLE: And, on my 16th birthday, the ladies pro bass anglers, they’re having a bass fishing tournament for me to be able to be on the pro tour.
KENNY: When she’s 16, the good Lord willing, she’ll be a professional female bass fisherman. The lady that was just in yesterday’s magazine is the lady that got us all hooked up with that. And she’s already an honorary member. She’ll be a full-fledged professional bass fisherman at 16.
That’s awesome.
DANIELLE: I’ve got 4 more years.
KENNY: But you also have…
DANIELLE: 3 more years.
ASHLEY: Fun, it’s going to be fun. A family-oriented show, lots of fun. We’re looking forward to getting lots of people outdoors.
Stay tuned for Part 3. For Part 1, click HERE.
PHOTO CREDIT: Southern Girls Got Game on Facebook
