As an unblemished target coasted to the ground far down the hillside, I heard the Old Man’s voice chuckle somewhere in time.
“That one got away,” his words smiled.
As per usual, I had shot pretty well on the course’s more challenging presentations. The simple “swing and shoot” opportunities, though, were thwarting me.
Shotgun games are among my most favorite outdoor pursuits, and clay target opportunities form the bulk of those. Translated to stick-and-ball sports, a clay target event bears most resemblance to a golf tournament. Whether you’re competing solo, as a duo or as part of a team, it’s a social occasion that involves group camaraderie and personal achievement at the same time. You’re delivering a personal performance as part of a crowd event.
As with golf, the handful of applicable tips are simple, and they open the door to great complexity. Feet just so, weight comfortably even, hands and head in a certain position, eyes at a given point, one smooth movement of torso, waist and knees turning and shifting weight — visualize the shot, execute the shot — follow the move all the way through. Nothing to it — nothing at all, except for everything.
You almost need to miss one and then hit one to re-prove to yourself you can do it, then you can get on with an enjoyable day. When you’ve missed, there’s a checklist to run through: Did you swing all the way through? Head down? Eyes level? Did you involve your thighs and your shoulders and swing all the way through?
Then each of us have personal tics we know to cause us to miss. If I’m below, above or behind a missed target, I feel it. That means if I don’t feel how I missed it, I led it too much.
People are waiting to shoot at each station, so there’s a necessity to be ready to shoot when it’s your turn. I have to combat the urge to hurry up and thus get myself out of their way. When my conscious tells me to get on with it, I intentionally take another 10 seconds to force myself to slow down.
Every station has its built-in difficulties. If the challenge is not obvious, it’s probably something to do with the range. A target that appears to fly dead level across is probably angled toward or away, so I take a moment to decide which, then stick with that decision. Sometimes I do better on the targets that come around trees or over hills because their challenge is clear and I don’t climb inside my own head.
The greatest benefit of a day spent shooting, of course, is the relief of other worries. Even if I’m not shooting well, my mind won’t go to my every day thoughts in the moments I’m on stand, and that interspersed relief is enough to make it all worthwhile.
One of the things I like most about the shotgun sports, and about wingshooting and sporting clays in particular, is how quickly fortunes can change.
To some extent, ego and self congratulation are part of any outdoor pursuit, although the wise are quiet about it. There’s never been a good shot so great it couldn’t be thoroughly marred by a bad shot promptly thereafter, and a previous loud celebration only adds to the downfall.
Turning in a truly outstanding score at sporting clays is a feat built in equal parts of practiced physical skill and determined mental discipline. Unlike the skeet and trap shotgun games, in which the distances and angles are essentially the same from one round and one course to the next, the sporting clay game is meant to be a clay target representation of real-world hunting scenarios. The best courses take advantage of the features of the terrain and the creativity of their designers. Like golf with a shotgun, no two courses are alike, and the difficulty of the task is also its attraction.
Good form and a smooth swing are key, and a hunter’s ability to adjust for the target’s speed, angle and distance, all of which vary from station to station, comprise the physical aspect of the test.
Perfect scores at sporting clays are effectively too rare to merit consideration, meaning even the very best shooters on the course will miss a few. What happens after those misses, then, determines just how few the misses will be. Learning from a miss without dwelling on it is what separates the competent from the excellent, and the excellent from the outstanding. Accumulating enough experience to know why you missed and correct it bridges the gap from competent to excellent, but the next step is much more difficult and unsteady. Remembering the correction while forgetting the mistake is a tougher exercise to complete.
The very best shooters will be in the 90 percent range, meaning they’ll expect to break 90 or more targets on a 100-shot course. If the course has 12 stations and they miss one target per station, that gives them a round of 88. If they have six perfect stations, they can miss one at each of the other six stations and still break 94.
Six perfect stations out of 12 isn’t all that unusual. Most shooters who are competent or better will have about that many in a round. It’s what happens on the other six that separates the 70s from the 90s. While a perfect station can happen for almost any shooter, a seven-out-of-eight at a station can represent outstanding mental toughness.
It’s something I’m certainly still a very long way from myself.
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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