“Every single solitary sport has follow-through [required],” Craig Sheaffer says as I stand before him, feeling the powerful weight of a shotgun in my hands for the first time. “Clay shooting is a shotgun sport. You have to have follow-through.” Uh oh.
Ask my parents; I have no follow-through. I’ve quit everything I’ve started- ballet, gymnastics, piano, track, oboe, drums, books, and in older years, exercise routines, diets, live-in boyfriends, living abroad, more books. Had I known about that requirement for skeet shooting beforehand, I maybe wouldn’t have followed through with my plan to give it a shot for my next “adventure.” But there I was standing atop Mowbray Mountain at Montlake Classic Clays, the late afternoon light glinting off the trees’ dazzling display of blazing orange, fiery red and shockingly bright deep-yellow and gold hues.
But it turns out that when it comes to skeet shooting, at least, I’m not alone in my lack of follow-through. “Ninetyfive percent of people who come up here stop their swing when they shoot,” Sheaffer says as he preps me to take my first shot. As the 11-year owner of Montlake and sponsor of Soddy-Daisy High School’s award-winning Skeet and Sporting Clays Team, he’s taught “hundreds of thousands of lessons over the years,” so I’m definitely in the right place to take on the sport. “They’re used to shooting at something that’s not moving. It’s muscle memory,” he says.
My mind flashes to the tin cans my dad used to set up in the backyard for us to try to “ping” off the fence where they sat lined in a row, then goes to the only other time I’d shot a gun. I was so intimidated by the force of the potential weapon in my hands that it was hard to concentrate as I closed one eye and aimed the pistol at the bulls-eye downrange. “Ninety percent close an eye,” Sheaffer says then, as if on cue. “It’s harder to judge distance
with one eye closed.”