Skill Sets - Practicing for Sporting Clays

Master Class! Congratulations. After much work and a lot of winning in the lower classes of the NSCA competition world, you finally won the last punch you needed to move to Master Class! A great feeling and a great accomplishment! You always knew you were this good! The next sporting clays competition arrives, and you register as MASTER! A proud moment! You go out to the competition course and shoot your game. You have a solid day and put up a solid score, not your best performance but a good score. You wait around after the competition for the final results to be posted. The scores come out and you begin looking for your name at the top of Master Class, because hey, that is where your name has been for months! The top of the class! You look at the top of Master Class and don’t see your name. You tell yourself, “That’s Ok. Can’t expect to win the first time in Master Class.” You begin scrolling down the list of names in Master Class expecting to see your name at any moment. You keep scrolling. A quarter of the way down now, and your name still hasn’t shown up. You keep scrolling. Halfway down now and geez, there are a lot of names here. You keep scrolling. Getting close to the bottom now. You keep scrolling and there you are, about three quarters of the way down. You finish about fifty out of sixty-five. You are shocked. This can’t be right. You check your score. Yes, that is the correct score and then, you start scanning the scores above you. You sigh in disappointment.
Six competitions later, your scores bottom out. You are nearly last in Master Class. It was only a few competitions ago that you were good and winning your class. The sport was fun! Now in Master Class, you can’t even finish in the top half of the class. You get frustrated. You begin thinking about quitting the sport. You are lost at what to do.
So many new Master Class competitors have found themselves in this very scenario. You just made Master Class and want so much to continue winning like you did in the lower classes, but Master Class is different than the other classes. The Professionals who compete for the National Championship every year are in Master Class. The Regional and State “Big Fish” who compete and win the Regional and State Championships every year are in Master Class. The former “Big Fish” who used to win all the time are in Master Class. All of these competitors have competed for over a decade. You realize if you are going to compete and win in Master Class, you need to get better. You realize you need to expand your game and improve your skills. You need a skill set. This book is written to help you create a skill set that will make you competitive in Master Class and the lower classes as well. The material in Skill Sets: Practicing for Sporting Clays will discuss the three major skill sets you need to compete and win in sporting clays. It will discuss the technical game, the mental game and the most important and least discussed skill set…execution. I have been competing in sporting clays over fifteen years and have experienced the highs and lows in the sport. The highs include a couple tours on the PSCA circuit, multiple State Championships, a 100 straight in competition and an All American Team to my credits. I have seen the lows as well finishing third from the bottom of Master Class. I have made many mistakes on my climb up the sporting clays mountain. I address many of my mistakes in this book to help you avoid them. This book was written from my vast experience to help you build a skill set to improve your game. Then once you have created this skill set, the book discusses how to practice these skill sets and make it better. Because once you have a skill set, you have to learn how to apply it. If you take the three fundamental skill sets in this book and apply it to your game, you will see your scores improve and the fun return to the sport you love and have worked so hard to master.

About the Author

Chris grew up on a cotton farm in the central deserts of Arizona. Belonging to an outdoor family, his first memories were of deer hunting camp where the entire family, including Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles and Cousins, would gather in late fall every year and spend a week in the remote mountains of southeast Arizona. The outdoors and hunting were a way of life for Chris’s family. Being one of the youngest in the family, Chris grew up watching everyone else hunting and shooting. Chris could hardly wait until the day when he could join the family in the field. The day arrived and Chris began carrying a shotgun into the field when he was only twelve years old. That day began a lifelong passion for shooting a shotgun. Shotgunning would take Chris across the country hunting. He hunted pheasants in Idaho, geese in New Mexico and quail in the deserts of Arizona.
Then in his early thirty’s Chris was invited to a sporting clays event in Boulder City, Nevada. Ducks Unlimited was holding their annual Ducks in the Desert sporting clays event. That event would change Chris’s shotgunning life forever. Sporting clays became Chris’s passion. This new found passion caused Chris to learn everything he could about the sport. He took lessons from several top pros in the country. He spent three days in an Immersion Clinic is north Texas to expand his knowledge and technical game. He spent a day with one of the greatest shooting champions in the world, Lanny Bassham, where he soaked up everything Lanny had to offer on the mental game. Chris quickly ascended the classes making Master Class in his second year of competition. Chris is now in his fifteenth year competing in sporting clays and has over 90,000 registered targets. Chris won his first State Championship in his sixth year of competition and has now won State Championships in all of the major events including the Main Event, Fitasc, 5-stand and Supersport. Chris earned his way on to the prestigious Professional Sporting Clays Association twice where he competed against the best competitors in the country. Chris made his first Open Class NSCA Fitasc All American team in 2019.
In 2018 Chris founded Blue Ribbon Shooting Sports and began teaching as a shotgun instructor. He has coaching credentials from NRA Sports as a Shotgun Coach and is in his third year of instructing. He has found a passion in helping students build a skill set to advance their shooting career. Chris enjoys helping his students avoid the mistakes he made on his climb to be a competitive Master Class shooter. To help instruct his students and all competitors in the sport Chris decided to create a guide on how to develop a set of skill sets. His passion has led to writing his first book Skill Sets: Practicing for Sporting Clays.