There are a tremendous amount of variants of shotgun sports. From international trapshooting to recreational sporting clays. A newcomer can become a little confused as to what sport people are talking about.
One term they may have heard of is skeet shooting, but what is skeet shooting?
Skeet shooting is a clay pigeon shooting sport consisting of 8 firing positions, 7 of which are on a semi circle. The two trap houses, one for ‘high’ and one for ‘low’ are situated at the ends of the semi circle. Competitors fire 25 shots in single and double presentations moving around the 8 stations. Each shooter is scored out of a possible 25 hits.
There are a few other terms that a newcomer to skeet may confuse with skeet shooting, and broadly speaking it gets confused with the terms ‘clay shooting’ and ‘trapshooting’.
Clay pigeon shooting – This can also just be referred to as ‘clay shooting’ and is the large umbrella term that encomapsses all shotgun sports. It is not a discipline of shooting. If you are taking a bird out of the air with a shotgun then in all variants you are clay pigeon shooting.
Trapshooting – Competitors stand 15m behind a fixed bunker trap that fires clays into the air from the same origin. The sport involves 5 shots at 5 stations so a competitor will be scored out of 25. The clays are typically rising so a ‘trapshooting’ gun may be needed.
Skeet Shooting – An Overview
Skeet shooting started out in life as a game called ‘shooting around the clock’ and was invented by two gentlemen, Charles Davis and William Harnden from Massachusetts in 1920.
While the original game was set on a clock face with a radius of 25 yards (23m) and the trap that fired the clays was set at 12 ‘o’ clock.
The problem as you might imagine is that makes the shooting range a 360 degree firing affair, which is pretty unsafe by modern standards. That wasn’t why the game changed though, as their original course ended up with a chicken farm next to it so the course had to be modified to reflect this new anomaly.
Just 3 years later in 1923, a man who was to later become known as the father of skeet named William Harnden Foster took the problem and solved it by making the circle a semi circle.
He placed a second trap at the 6 ‘o’ clock position, and the shooters would move around the semi circle to produce a different shooting angle to the clays at each station.
He then set about trying to make it an official sport.
He worked with National Sportsman and Hunting and Fishing magazine and offered $100 to anyone who could come up with a name for it.
A gentleman by the name of Gertrude Hurlbutt won the competition, who presumably had some knowledge of Norwegian because although ‘skeet’ was chosen it was based on the Norwegian word ‘skyte’ which means ‘shoot’.
Skeet shooting as a sport was born.
In 1926, the very first Skeet Championship took place and following that competition, the National Skeet Shooting Association was both suggested and formed.
Because of the changing angles of the shooter to a target, in WW2 the US military used its principle lessons to instruct gunners on how to shoot flying targets.
Skeet today is available for all to participate. It can be used by youngsters with 410 shotguns who want to practice weapon safety and protocol, all the way to international shooting. Within that wide scope lie the rest of us.
Thus normally any type of shotgun can be used for recreational shooting from 410 pump actions to semi automatic 12 gauges, although they have different design purposes.
Most shooters who take it up as a sport though will use a typical ‘over and under’ style shotgun as why not progress through the sport with the only shotgun that is allowed at certain levels.
The actual clay pigeons that are used in skeet shooting are 11cm as a diameter and 3cm in height. Unsurprisingly they are made of clay. They are designed to be brittle to any shotgun pellet will chip off a piece, thus denoting a hit.
How A Round Of Skeet Is Shot
The competitors arrive at station 1 and will progress around the semi circle.
The traps are next to station 1 and station 7 with a semi circle of shooting positions between them. Station 8 is halfway between stations 1 and 7.
The ‘traps’ are the throwing houses that launch the clay into the air when a referee depresses a trigger following the instruction to ‘pull’.
Typically a set of trap houses may have a ‘high house’ and a ‘low house’. The high house will fire a clay bird from 3m above the ground and the low house will fire the clay from around 1m from the ground.
So the competitors or single user of the skeet field will start at station 1 near one of the trap houses.
Once firing has finished at station 1 the competitors will move sequentially through to station 7.
Station 1 and Station 2 present clays from the high house and then the low house in singular fashion. Then a double shot is required, that is two clays launched simultaneously form both the high house and the low house when both clays must be shot at.
The stations 3,4, and 5 all require a shot at single targets, first from the high house and then the low.
A similar pattern then emerges as at stations 6 and 7 the shooter will fire at clay birds in single fashion, first from the high house and then again from the low. A double shot is then required.
Moving on to the last station a shooter shoots at one from the high house and then the low.
By now 24 shots out of 25 have been fired.
If a shooter has missed a clay on any of the first 24 shots he must retake the shot of the first that he missed. If the shooter has a perfect score of 24 then they take a low house shot from station 8 (it used to be the preferred station and trap house but competition rules changed it for speed.
So a round of skeet is considered 25 shots, consisting of 17 single clays with 8 as doubles for a total of 25 clays presented.
Skeet is normally done with anything up to 5 shooters with shotguns capable of firing two shots at a target display.
How Does Scoring Work In Skeet Shooting
Each shooter will start with a card split into 3 sections which are singles, doubles, and the 25th shot. It is further subdivided into H and L for High and Low.
The scorecard represents each of the 8 stations, and the singles and double clays that will be presented.
So when a shooter starts his round at station 1 they will shout ‘pull’ and will fire and attempt to hit the clay whizzing across the sky.
A referee will then mark a slash (\) for a hit of the clay and a zero (0) will be entered for a missed clay.
A clay is considered hit if a visible chip shatters and 2 pieces of the clay are visible to the referee.
Eventually the scorecard will fill with slashes or zeros depending upon how many clays are hit.
At the end of station 7 the referee will be able to see exactly what station and whether it was the high or low trap that was responsible for the first miss.
Competitors then go to their 1st miss to try again for their 25th shot. If none have been missed it is the low trap from station 8 which is where they should end anyway.
The count of the number of hits is then totalled up for each competitor with the winner being the person with the least missed clays.
For a very good shooter it is often easier to count the misses off the total of 25 shots. For example if you count 2 misses out of 25 then there must be 23 hits.
Is Skeet Shooting An Olympic Sport?
Yes, international skeet has been an Olympic event since 1968.
In 1992 the rules changed to make way for the gender split, which was somewhat controversial. The current champion was a woman named Zhang Shan from China.
Women got their own skeet Olympic event in 2000.
The Olympic events can be somewhat different from recreational skeet as they introduce a random delay of up to 3 seconds after a ‘pull’ has been called. Additionally the shooter must fire from a non standard firing and shoulder the weapon only when the target appears.
