National Skeet Shooting Association | National Sporting Clays Association
The 2019 National Sporting Clays Championship is underway, and scores are being posted as events are completed. You can keep up with the latest scores and results at Winscoreonline.com.
You can find the Event Program and other information on the week’s events on our National Championship page.
The National Championship will continue through Friday, October 4.
For the first time at the National Sporting Clays Championship, the National Shooting Complex has two new hospitality suites that are being made available for rent to Nationals participants and vendors. Located in the newly constructed third vendor building, the new units are each 20 feet x 30 feet (600 square feet), with a glass store-front view to the north and easy access with numeric keypad lock.
Shooters may rent the suites by the day for use by a squad or friends before and after shooting, for parties, or just a place to relax. Each includes two couches, coffee table, a high-top table and chairs, TV with cable channels, refrigerator, and heat/air conditioning. It also includes two reserved parking spaces on the day the unit is rented.
The suites are available starting October 19 through October 27. For Nationals, the suites are being offered at an inaugural rate of $175 per day. To reserve one, contact Olivia Gracia at nscrv@nssa-nsca.com or 210-688-3371 ext. 244.
Most shooters think practice means shooting a round of sporting clays. I take a wee bit of exception to that notion. Shooting one last round at your local club before heading off to the National Shooting Complex is unlikely to improve or tighten up a specific part of your game. Practice, on the other hand, works on a specific part of your game in preparation for competition.
There are several practice areas I typically assign to my students as I encourage them to focus on one or two specific aspects of their game between lessons. A detailed explanation of all the various types of practice is best left for a magazine series, but examples include pre-shot routine, gun mount and movement, visual focus, commitment to break points, and pre-shot planning.
Additionally, you might want to focus on about a dozen different types of target presentations from time to time, based on your confidence level when engaging each: rabbits, teals, descending / transitioning targets, trap targets, crossing targets, quartering targets, rising targets, incoming targets, tower shots, below-the-chest, plunging targets, and more. The target presentation that you should prioritize in practice is the shot in which you have the least amount of confidence.
Ray Floyd, World Golf Hall of Fame inductee, former Ryder Cup Captain, and winner of multiple PGA Championships, is one of my students. During one of our lessons, I asked him, “What’s your favorite club, Ray?” He answered abruptly, “I don’t have one.” He went on to explain that if he ever had a favorite club, that would mean that some other aspect of his game had a weakness. Ray’s goal was to never have a favorite club or a weak shot.
Generally, shooting a round of sporting clays will not help you improve your game at the rate most of us desire. Dissect your game, identify the biggest areas of opportunity, and dedicate some practice time to each one. In an ideal world, we should be equally confident in all types of target presentations and in all aspects of our game. While few of us may ever fully realize this utopian level of preparedness, the confidence we need to win must be built through practice.
Don Currie is NSCA’s Chief Instructor, an Orvis Wingshooting School instructor, and Master Class competitor. To get free shooting tips and videos, sign up for his monthly newsletter.  You can also see more tips from Currie at www.doncurrie.com.
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.