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This Month In Clay Target Nation

CTN April 2025

The April issue of Clay Target Nation is full of hard-hitting tips and tactics to help you improve your shooting and have more fun.

In our Training Tips columns, instructor Al Scooler offers a simple tip to improve your odds on high 1, while Anthony Matarese Jr. gets serious about confronting the excuses that are holding you back from reaching your full potential.

This year, we’re celebrating CTN’s 10th anniversary by bringing you one article each issue from our 2016 archives, and in April, that’s a feature on a topic most shooters can relate to: how to break out of a rut. You’ll also find a feature outlining what to expect out of the fully custom gunstock process, and a cool feature highlighting some successful Ladies Nights at various clubs. We interview some of skeet’s best shooters about how they handle the pressure to constantly be perfect, and we also take a look at how to understand target types as well as target presentations during your shot planning. And don’t miss instructor Deon Thompson’s article “Body of Work,” in which he encourages shooters to pay attention to how they body feels—not just how everything looks—when they’re setting up.

Advertisers in the April issue are:

Clay Target Nation is available monthly to all members in digital and/or print form. Not a member? You can receive the next issue when you join at http://nssa-nsca.org/join-nssa-nsca/.

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Question of the Week: Life Member Magazine

“I am a Life Member. Why have I stopped receiving my magazine in the mail?”

Life Members are required to shoot a minimum of 100 registered targets each year to maintain your print subscription to Clay Target Nation. Once you shoot the required targets and they are reported to headquarters, the subscription should restart automatically within 6-8 weeks. However, every member is entitled to the digital issue. We email members a link to it monthly (late in the month, a few days before print magazines arrive). If you aren’t receiving the link to the digital issue, contact us at CTN@nssa-nsca.com — be sure to include your name and member number — and we’ll add you to the list.

Sherry Kerr
Director of Communications

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The Challenges and Opportunities of Member Communications

CTN

clay-target-magYou probably can’t name a sport with memberships more diverse than skeet and sporting clays. Because they can be pursued successfully and with enjoyment by people of virtually any age or gender, we have the good fortune of memberships from young to old, male and female, novice to world championship levels. Members span wide-ranging income levels, vocations, and locations. Some participate in sporting clays or skeet exclusively, while others shoot both sports through dual memberships or the Crossfire program. Our members span all levels of technological expertise.

Target TalkOur diversity presents us not only with the great opportunity to grow our sports and our membership ranks among many demographics, but also with a number of challenges — none greater than how to communicate effectively with everyone when their ages, genders, resources, professions, skills and other measures vary so widely. We need to be able to reach and fill the needs of our current, diverse members while looking ahead to those we hope to attract to membership in the future. At any given time, if we’re not considering both those of us who are already members and our potential future members, we are being short-sighted.

ScreenshotOne element of our approach to that has been to offer a variety of channels of communications so there is something for everyone. We offer a printed magazine, Clay Target Nation, for content that is less time-sensitive and for those who prefer the printed format. We have a digital version of the same for those who like the convenience of their reading materials on an e-reader and who enjoy its interactivity. We produce a weekly e-newsletter, Target Talk, for more time-sensitive content and virtually everything we need to impart to our members. If a member uses a computer, tablet, or smartphone, Target Talk is easily accessible. But did you know we make it available free to anyone who wishes to subscribe, even non-members, for the marketing benefits it offers? We now have over 76,000 subscribers.

Our websites are important communications tools both for regular pages that are always maintained as well as for timely news stories that can be found on the home pages. The websites are so important that we have invested in an all-new platform that can grow as needed and allow us to offer new features in the coming weeks, months, and years. The websites are not only essential to member business but also to prospective members, for whom the website is often our first means of communication.

On an as-needed basis when a particular topic needs attention or we need to reach a segment of our membership, we do email blasts. We maintain social media pages where we distribute content and respond to members who reach out to us there. We provide a text-messaging service at major events and have assisted some member clubs in offering a similar service.

There is more on the way, and we’re sure there are other niches we can fill. For example, we know our member clubs are your day-to-day connection to the sports, and we want to help them communicate better with you. Some of our clubs do a wonderful job of communicating with shooters already, while others could benefit from some guidance to help them improve. We want to offer them that help, in part by sharing the good practices of those clubs doing it well. One way we will be offering help to clubs is through a club newsletter we will launch soon.

Communication goes in both directions. That’s why every issue of Target Talk includes multiple links to reach us. It also tells you how to reach Clay Target Nation. Did you know you can click “Reply” on any issue of Target Talk — or any other email you get from us, for that matter — to send us an email? Every issue of Clay Target Nation also includes our contact information. At the top of our website, on every page, you will find a “Contact” link that takes you to contact information for any person at headquarters you need to reach. Our “Sound Off” feature in Clay Target Nation is a small way of asking any and every member for their thoughts.

Because communicating well with our members is so important to us, the September issue of Clay Target Nation will launch a new column from Director of Communications, Sherry Kerr. She will use it to tell you more about the communications channels we’re offering, how we’re expanding them, and how you can participate.

For now, you should know this:

We want you to contribute to your publications, and your ideas are always welcome. Have a question? Why not get the answer straight from us? You can email us at ClayTargetNation@nssa-nsca.com, TargetTalk@nssa-nsca.com, or to a specific person listed on our Staff Directory.

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Send Us Your Shoot Wrap-ups and News

Submit stories

With our new magazine format and website, NSSA-NSCA has the opportunity to include reports from many of your shoots, along with photos. While we will have writers covering the largest of sporting clays and skeet events, we’d love to recognize some of those that we won’t be covering ourselves.

If you participated in an event, especially if you shot high-quality photos, you are invited to send us a shoot wrap-up.

We will be including some shoot reports in our printed magazine, some on ClayTargetNation.com, and some in both places. We also expect – especially when there’s a good selection of photos – to use some abbreviated wrap-ups in the magazine with a link to a longer article and photo gallery on the website.

In addition to shoot wrap-ups, we’d like to hear about other important news, especially perfect scores and other reasons that warrant kudos.

While we do not expect our members to be professional writers and photographers, we’ve compiled some pointers that will help you submit your best material, increase its likelihood of being published, and help us process it efficiently. Here are some points to keep in mind:

    • Be timely. Plan to write your article as soon as possible following the event. With magazine content deadlines about two months before the cover date, a long delay in submitting your news will make it out-of-date before it can be published.
    • Include the basics. Cover all the basic W’s: who, what, when, where, why. We do not have staff to do additional research, so we must depend on you for all the facts.
    • Get the facts correct. Make sure the winners are listed right, names spelled correctly, full name of the club given, etc.
    • Writing tips. Write your article first, then give it a title. When starting with a title, many people tend to treat it as a first sentence and leave out important facts from the actual first paragraph. Also, write in third-person (he, she, they) rather than first-person (I, we). Please, no inside jokes that most readers won’t understand. Write it as a reporter rather than a participant, assuming the reader knows only what you are telling them.
    • Shoot high-resolution digital photos. Shoot and send us photos in the highest possible resolution or largest size your camera allows. If they are not high-res, they probably won’t make the cut for the print magazine but may be suitable for ClayTargetNation.com. Sorry, we cannot accept photo prints.
    • Plan photography in advance. Consider having a professional photographer or an accomplished hobbyist to photograph important events. If possible, write captions or identify the people in the photos. On the website, we can create photo galleries, so if you have lots of good ones, it’s fine to send as many as you’d like. If you didn’t shoot the photos, be sure to tell us who did so we can give them credit.
    • Email it to us. Send us the story, photos, and any additional information in one email to CTN@nssa-nsca.com, with the name of the shoot in the subject line. If attaching large photos requires multiple emails, send as many as you need to but please be sure the shoot name is in the subject line of each. Because of the volume of email we receive, it’s easy to get materials mixed up if they aren’t properly labeled. If you have large files and have access to Dropbox, you may share your materials with skerr@nssa-nsca.com.
    • Include contact info. Always include the name and email address of the person submitting the information and who reported the event, if it’s different. We may need to contact you with a follow-up question, and we want to credit the person providing the material.

Submissions will be edited. Please be aware that we will edit your submissions to present them in the best way possible, as well as for space considerations. Also, we cannot promise that every submission will be published, although it is our hope to use as many as possible.

We look forward to receiving and publishing your shoot coverage, photos, and news! Contact us at CTN@nssa-nsca.com with any questions and your contributions.

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The Story of Our First Cover Photo

Cover shoot

As you might imagine, planning for the first issue of Clay Target Nation began many months ago, but no decision had our editorial team more stumped than the first cover. Of course, it had to be special and set the tone for the months and years to follow. But with coverage of both the World Skeet Championships and National Sporting Clays Championship planned for the inaugural issue, and an earnest desire to spread the wealth evenly between sporting clays and skeet topics, who would get the cover?

One of those head-scratching sessions yielded this statement from yours truly: “Let’s have both champions on the same cover.” Considering there’s a span of a few weeks between the two events, and we had no idea who either of those champions would be, well, let’s just say it was viewed as a very tentative plan.

As discussion continued, the idea began to grow legs: once the World Skeet HOA Champion was determined, we would ask him or her to travel back to San Antonio on Sunday, October 25, the final day of the National Sporting Clays Championship. At its conclusion, we would grab that champ for a photo shoot with our skeet champion — if all the stars aligned. If they didn’t, the back-up plan that we did not want to employ was two separate photo shoots and some Photoshop magic.

The World Shoot produced a first-time HOA, Mike Peterson, that I didn’t know. Sitting in the shoot-off stadium during awards, I was anxiously waiting to see the new champion step forward to accept one of the five medals he earned so I could identify him, snag him for a conversation, and persuade him to come back to San Antonio in a few weeks for a photo shoot. To my surprise, when his name was called, the young man sitting next to me rose to begin collecting his bounty. When he returned, I was ready to pounce. Hey, this might work!

Within a few minutes, I’d had a delightful conversation with the 25-year-old Peterson and made my pitch to have him return to San Antonio from his Wisconsin home for a photo shoot with our sporting clays champion. He graciously agreed, assuming he could be cleared to miss work on Monday while he traveled back home. Within a few more days, we were able to check that obstacle off our list as well.

By now, we all know about the visit of Hurricane Patricia during the National Sporting Clays Championship. Yes, we’re still going to do the photo shoot, I assured Mike Peterson, and he boarded the plane.

Mike arrived Sunday afternoon as sporting clays shooters were still competing, bringing along his shotgun and a fistful of medals. Now he, editor Hilary Dyer, and I only had to wait for the conclusion of Nationals to see who would grace the cover along with him.

We had enlisted the extraordinary Thaddius Bedford to photograph the champions. He pitched some ideas, and we were anxious to see his vision come to life. To save time, we scouted locations near the stadium field that weren’t overly muddy and acquired a ladder so Bedford could obtain the right perspective. After he explained one of his photo concepts to us, we laid out clay targets in a grid on top of a trap house, thankful that his artist’s eye could visualize how this was going to come together better than we could.

Competition continued, dragging later and later into the evening. Around midnight, the last shoot-off finally produced a winner, William Walton, and in the next moment he was being whisked away by Executive Director Michael Hampton to our photo shoot. “We’ll do this right in a few minutes,” he told Walton as he hung a medal around his neck and handed him a championship ring, “but now we have to do a photo shoot!”

Bedford started with a few shots of the champions displaying their rings at arms’ length. “Yes, we like those,” we said, looking at the camera’s viewer. Then he climbed the ladder and directed the champions to stand among the grid of targets on the trap house. He shot a few frames and showed us the result. “Money shot!” exclaimed Hilary, and we knew we had our cover.

In case you’re wondering, no, we don’t plan to go this route again. The 2016 World Shoot will be covered in the November issue of Clay Target Nation, and the National Sporting Clays Championship will be featured in December.