So, what is Skeet?

What is Skeet?

As ShootClay’s self confessed skeet addict we thought our readers may like to get an overview of Skeet shooting and what it’s all about.

Skeet is one of the many disciplines within the bounds of the sport of Clay Pigeon Shooting. It’s sometimes overlooked and under rated but is very good practice as it allows you to shoot targets from many different angles.  There are mix of singles and simultaneous pairs comprising of  incoming, driven, quartering and crossing targets requiring increasing and then decreasing amounts of lead during a round thrown from 2 trap houses referred to as the high house and low house.  The trap houses are located at 9 o’clock (high) and 3 o’clock (low) on the layout.  Below is an image of a Skeet layout, the dimensions are the same across the disciplines but the speed of targets, target shooting order and rules differ across disciplines.

George Digweed MBE; the 19 time World Champion has won the English Skeet British Open on several occasions and uses it to get his eye in after rifle shooting. Read more in the ShootClay interview with George here.

There are several Skeet disciplines regularly shot worldwide, Skeet originated in the USA for hunters to practice ready for the hunting season and originally used live pigeons although these were later replaced with artificial clay targets now referred to as “Clay Pigeons”.

 The shooting layout was originally a full circle similar to a clock face, this was later changed to a semi circle with 8 shooting positions for safety reasons along with the introduction of Clay Pigeons thrown from manual and more recently automatic traps. Although there are 8 shooting stations not all 8 are used in every discipline.  The different disciplines, official abbreviations and governing bodies are shown in the table below:

 Hopefully that gives you a basic introduction into the different Skeet disciplines, we will be publishing more detailed deep dives into the individual disciplines soon…

Jon.