Skeet Chokes and the Feedback Loop

The first year that the World English Sporting came to our country, I was doing an experiment in the offseason leading up to it. I had a full in the top barrel and a modified in the bottom barrel, and I was shooting everything with mod and full. Everything.

I got to the world shoot; Mick Howells won it. That year, he won the Seminole Cup, the Browning Briley, and the World English all within four weeks of each other. He was in the zone.

It was a two-day shoot with 100 birds each day. The first day I choked my gun exactly like I would have choked it. If I thought it took IC and skeet, I put IC and skeet in. And three-fourths of the way through that shoot, it was miserable. I was not getting what I was used to seeing when I was practicing when I would hit a target, making me want to try to fix something that’s not broken.

Two-thirds or three-fourths of the way through, Vicki said “Put that mod and full back in there and let’s roll.” I did, and I didn’t miss any more targets in that round, and I only dropped six or seven in the hundred birds the next day.

Three years before that at the Browning Briley, Virgil Minshew came to me and said, “Coach, I just can’t close.”

“What do you mean, you can’t close?” I asked.
“The targets aren’t that hard,” he said. “I can break them all in practice. But I just can’t close on a good score.”
“Are you still using extra full when you practice?”
“Yep.”
“What are you shooting in tournament?”
“Skeet, IC, mod… whatever it takes.”

And I said, “Do yourself and me a favor. Screw those extra fulls in there and put some Loctite on them. When’s your next shoot?”
“Two weeks, the Florida State Shoot.”

He put those extra fulls in, he ran a 100 straight in the 5-stand, high overall in the main. I think he only missed two in FITASC. He won the prelim, he won everything.

Here’s the conclusion I drew from that experiment, and the experiment that I did on my own two or three years later. Like Dr. Leif French said in one of the interviews I did: you can have the greatest practice routine in the world, but if you don’t have the feedback loop, it’s worthless.

What we all need to understand is the feedback loop when we’re shooting is how we hit the target. It’s extremely important. You may not be able to get spreaders, but you always have your skeet choke. It’s of utmost importance that you go shoot some skeet choke type targets to see what it looks like when you do your job, and it’s stable, and you know you’ve centered it. It’s not going to smoke it. But if you don’t do that, and you open up the skeet, you are opening yourself up for doubt.

I’ve tried it myself. I learned my lesson that day. I’ll never forget when Vicki looked at me and she said… well, she used several expletives.

It didn’t take me long to put that mod in the bottom and full at the top. But we just rocked on, and had a good time. I tried it. Virgil did it at my encouragement and it was a great success for him and he won. He learned a big lesson there and I proved it to myself with my own shooting.

So, when you’re coming up to tournaments, get two or three boxes and go out and shoot some close, easy targets with a skeet choke so you’ll know what it looks like.

 

This is an excerpt from the July 2021 Coaching Hour podcast. You can listen to it and read a written transcript, along with more than 20 years of archived episodes with your Knowledge Vault membership.