Visualization in Sporting Clays vs Trap and Skeet

In sporting, the ability to visualize in detail the movie of the shots you are about to ask your brain to create is critical. But it’s increasingly more difficult due to presentation being different from shoot to shoot, day to day, and even morning to afternoon. We have walked the same course in the afternoon after we had shot the course in the morning and when looking at the targets said to each other “I’m glad we shot that one in the morning!” or “Wow, I wish we could have shot that station now.” The angle of the sun the direction of the wind or any number of things can affect how sporting courses are shot. Some of the same courses will not shoot the same way morning to afternoon or day to day.

In skeet and trap, all the fields are laid out to face ten degrees east of north, giving the shooters a perfect background to see the targets optimally. But not so in sporting. It is hard to make the same course shoot the same in sporting day in and day out!

In sporting, being able to break any target out there in different breakpoints allows you to play the game to your advantage, by breaking the first target of the pair to make the second target easily seen and broken with minimum eye and hand movement. In addition, being able to read the target in your chosen breakpoint and know what it is really doing is of equal importance to breaking it.