Diagnosing Skeet and Sporting Clays Misses

Skeet and sporting clays both present unique challenges.

Before you can even begin learning how to compete in skeet, you need to learn how to break targets in the same breakpoints on each station every time. It’s a more regimented game of the same targets over and over. Sporting is anything but that.

So, the ability to spot a problem in skeet is a little easier than in sporting.

If you’re a skeet shooter who’s consistently having problems on High 2 or Low 5, an experienced coach will take a look at your mechanical actions and suggest things to work into your game to bring consistency to those two shots.

If you find yourself dropping random targets in the third or fourth box after running the first two, that shows you were either getting careful or careless and thinking more about outcome rather than the process.

A similar principle applies to sporting clays, though it’s more complex due to the presentations being all over the place and your unawareness of the targets’ difficulty. This makes it difficult for a coach to diagnose whether a shooter misses targets due to a breakdown in mechanical fundamentals or being careful or careless.

In skeet, the fields are all laid out to face ten degrees east of north. This gives shooters a perfect background to optimally see the targets. But not in sporting – it’s hard to make the same course shoot the same on the same day!

In sporting, having the ability to break any target in different breakpoints allows you to play the game to your advantage. You break the first target of the pair in order to make the second target easily seen and broken with minimum eye and hand movement.

The ability to read a target in your chosen breakpoint and know what it’s actually doing is equally important as breaking it.