You have been shooting for a few years, and you have shot a few tournaments, and you are starting to develop some consistency. But where do you go from here?
You got to where you are on your own by asking how other people shot certain targets, watching free how-to videos on YouTube, and just shooting a lot. But there is no road map to get to where you wanted to be.
Don’t feel alone, because everybody who shoots sporting clays has to face this situation eventually. You really want to get better but you don’t know where to turn. You are spending most of your downtime thinking about shooting and it seems as if every time you get a spare couple of hours you find yourself at the gun club shooting clays.
The overwhelming problem is that, regardless of what you do, when you look at your results, it finally hits you that you are not getting better. Your frustration turns into determination and you make an even greater commitment to shoot more and try harder. What you’re looking for is an A-B-C-D course that will take the conglomeration of methods you have developed and will mold them into a consistent shooting system. But unfortunately, that is not the way skill is built.
If we were shooting skeet or trap, finding an A-B-C-D approach to developing a game would be simpler because the targets are always thrown the same way. The consistency of the targets makes it much easier to identify a problem target or trajectory. In sporting, nothing is the same; the speed, distance, angles, background, or presentation station to station. Even the targets are different sizes.
This is the good, bad, and ugly about sporting clays. Try as they may, the target setters can set a course but they cannot set a course that will play the same morning to afternoon or day to day. It will be the same, but it will not play the same due to wind, angle of the sun, and how that changes contrast between the target and the background, as well as other factors.
Because of this, to be a great shooter in our game you must first learn how to handle the gun from a low mount and pre-mounted position. You must learn how to control the target from in front and stop chasing the targets down from behind and trying to fix the shot at the end.
Breaking the game down into its parts would be the first step: crossers from both sides and quartering from both sides, and targets going up and down.
As professional coaches, our findings indicate that out of all the presentations in the game, mastering the crossing shot should be at the top of your list. This means you must back away from playing the game and shoot single targets. It doesn’t matter from which side – just pick one and shoot single targets over and over again and again until your brain understands what it will look like when you pull the trigger.
Now, you are probably saying that this doesn’t sound like much fun. Your attitude about what you are doing will control the time it takes to achieve mastery. But you must start somewhere.
Learning to see separation between the target and the gun is a necessity for improving consistency and higher scores. We call this peripheral acceptance, or how far in front of the target you are comfortable with the gun. The farther behind the muzzle you are comfortable seeing the bird, the higher your scores will be.
This is what we have found that keeps shooters (especially new shooters) stuck at the many plateaus that are in our game. They love the going-away birds because the gun and bird are so close together. But on a crosser, the bird and the gun have to be in two different places at the same time, and knowing what that looks like allows for higher scores and performances!
