Skeet is an easy game - it's just that a person needs to shoot a perfect 100 to compete well, and doing that regularly is not easy at all.
Some of the region's best shooters showed how the game is played Labor Day weekend at the Tulsa Gun Club, which hosted the 2013 Oklahoma State Skeet Association State Championships. Seventy-five shooters entered for a chance at cash winnings, trophies and belt buckles, and with the knowledge that little other than perfect scores would earn those bits of hardware or bragging rights. The scoreboard sported several "100" marks each day.
This is an annual competition of old and young, male and female. Some entire families travel, shoot and camp together in motorhomes, staying at the gun club grounds at least three days, shooting doubles competition on the first day, 12 and 20 gauge the next and 28 gauge and .410 bores the third. Those who shoot in all five competitions swing on 500 targets in regulation, plus more in shoot-off tiebreakers. The high all-around shooter for the weekend was Van Lewis of Winfield, Kan., who hit 497 out of 500.
It's an outing of friendship and fellowship, a game of focus and concentration and a show of gunmetal and craftsmanship.
Russ Stevens of St. Joseph, Mo., has been playing the skeet game more than 40 years and has shot at venues all over the world, thanks to his military service. Like many of the top shooters, he swings a German-made Krieghoff Model 80 double-barreled over-under. Different barrels and sleeves can be affixed to the one gun to shoot all the different categories.
These shotguns are common enough on the skeet fields they're simply called a "K-80," but no two are the same, with nearly endless configurations and carvings, wooden stocks, etchings, engravings and other options. Such a gun might run from a low of around $4,000 to as much as you care to spend.
"There are only three like this in the world," Stevens said of his K-80. His has a custom Marine emblem handsomely molded in relief at the back of the receiver - a true work of art.
Galen Chapman of Wichita, Kan., shot on the same squad as Stevens. Skeet shooters go through the competition as groups of five, but they are scored as individuals. People on a squad might not even be competing in the same division. The squad arrangement just helps organize the flow of the event, which started at 9 a.m. and wrapped up around 7 p.m. each day.
Chapman, an Army soldier just one year back from Kuwait, showed off custom carved barrel bands on his K-80. "There won't be any more like this - the guy who made these died," he said.
As we talked, Chapman's wife, Shelby, walked past on her way to the clubhouse with children Reed, 2, and Aidan, 5, in tow, each wearing hearing protection earmuffs that gave them a cute bobble-head look.
The grandmother of those children, Michele Spradling of Wichita, competed with a squad in the next field and was on her way to hitting her first straight 100. She and her husband, Cloyce, and son-in-law, Chapman, had a grand family weekend traveling with the whole family, and friends.
Spradling said she was a scorekeeper the first year her husband and son-in-law got into skeet five years ago. "I was keeping score and finally I said, 'Just give me a gun,' " she said. Four years later, Saturday, she hit her first 100.
She, too, shot with a K-80, although the stock on it was not classic hardwood but a hollow, satin-polished stainless steel skeleton with rods and adjustment screws exposed. "It's fully adjustable," she said. "I've started shooting a lot better since I put this on."
"It's an expensive sport," she confessed.
She was one of at least five first-timers to shoot 100s during the tournament. Like many, she had shot 25-straight numerous times. To put four of those 25s together in a row is no small thing. Tradition after that happens is for the shooter to throw his or her hat in the air and allow a cadre of shooters to have at it.
Spradling let someone else exercise his throwing arm with the hat, tucking a water bottle inside the hat, locking it in by folding the bill under the brim to give it some heft for throwing. Up it went, and up and up and up with consecutive hits from about 14 gunners who lined up to unload on the airborne lid.
Peppered and perforated, the hat finally floated down beyond the skeet houses, about 25 yards out from the line. Spradling smiled and received congratulations all around, her first 100 firmly in the books.
"They tell me it'll be easier now," she said. "I don't know."
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The Game of Skeet
The targets: Clay targets are released from "high house" (10 feet high) and "low house" (3 feet, 6 inches high) about 126 feet apart on either side of field arranged in an arc. The targets angle slightly away from the field and cross within three feet of each other, 15 feet high, at the center of their paths.
The stations: The targets follow the same path every time, but the shooters must move counterclockwise through a series of eight stations around the arc:
Station 1 (at the high house): Shooters get four targets: a single target from the high house, a single from the low house and then both released simultaneously as a pair. In the pair the shooter has to shoot the high-house bird first.
Station 2: Four targets: Two singles and a pair. In the pair, shoot the high-house bird first.
Station 3: Two singles
Station 4: Two singles
Station 5: Two singles
Station 6: Four targets: Two singles and a pair. In the pair shoot the low-house bird first.
Station 7: (at the low house) Two singles and a pair. Shoot low-house bird first.
Station 8: (at center field) Two singles, first facing the high house, and the last one (or two) facing the low house.
Option Bird: Targets through the eight stations total 24. If at any point a shooter misses a target he gets a repeat shot at that target, called "taking your option bird" - but it also means the best he can score is a 24. If the shooter has a clean run he gets to shoot the last target twice, known as getting "two at low eight" and the chance for a perfect 25.
Original Print Headline: Straight Shooters
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Watch scenes from the state shoot and learn skeet basics in a video
Kelly Bostian
Sweat soaked through the desert camo bucket hat covering Chris Middleton's head, adding character to the camo pattern around the Army sergeant's insignia on the front, above his reddened face.
At the time, it was just an interesting detail. The story and context didn't call for its use. But this week it came back into focus and I searched through archives to find the photo for print.
