The History of Sporting Clays in America
Sporting clays competitions in England were popularized in 1925. However, it took 60 years for the game to formally cross the Atlantic.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2024 issue of Project Upland Magazine. This online article is an abridged version.
There is little dispute that sporting clay target presentations have been thrown in the United States for a long time. An article titled “Sporting Clays – the True History of the Game” documented many of the game’s staple targets. It mentioned that tower shots, over-water-targets, and multiple angle shots have been featured at US gun clubs for more than 100 years.
Some of the station names, such as “duck skeet,” “quail walk,” “trap hunting,” and “grouse shoot” date back to the early 1900s. They are instantly recognizable to modern sporting clays aficionados. It’s just that no one, it seems, thought to call the game “sporting clays.”
Introduction of Sporting Clays to America
Outdoor writer and shotgunning authority Bob Brister was introduced to the sport in the mid-1970s. At that time, he toured England’s best-known shooting courses with British course designer Chris Cradock. In 1980, Brister penned his influential Field & Stream article, “At Last a Clay Target Game for Hunters.” It was likely the first article to introduce the sport to an American audience.
Brister, an enthusiastic advocate of bringing the contest across the Atlantic, named about half a dozen clubs that already featured sporting targets. Three had important roles during the next few years: Sunnydell Shooting Grounds, Remington Farms, and the Orvis Shooting School in Manchester, Vermont. Brister believed the sport needed “a regional or a national sporting clays shoot,” adding, “I have presented the idea of a sponsorship of a US National Sporting Clays Championship to several major firms in the US gun and ammunition industry.” It would be five more years before that idea became reality.
Brister contacted Remington’s advertising and publicity staff in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He learned the company’s visionaries were “intrigued by the potential” of British sporting clays as a way to increase shotgun and ammunition sales. Brister agreed to provide them with more information on the sport during his next trip to England, and he put them in contact with British course setter Chris Cradock.
The First Sporting Clays Shoots In The United States
The Remington and Brister collaboration produced the first shoot in America formally titled “sporting clays.” Called the First Annual Sporting Clays Shoot, it was organized by Remington’s Gerald Quinn at the Remington Gun Club in Lordship, Connecticut on September 27, 1980. The 30-target affair was attended by some 90 shooters.
Although the Lordship range hosted sporting clay fundraisers for several years after 1980, Remington never sponsored a second annual contest. If they had, this would be a shorter story. Quinn says the reason was that the company was broadening its reach through partnerships with the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). The group decided to focus their combined efforts at Remington Farms in Rock Hall, Maryland.
Sporting clays might have gotten its official footing the next year, 1981, on the other side of the country, when Chuck Dryke of Sunnydell Shooting Grounds in Sequim, Washington, held a shoot that featured competitive sporting clays targets. But Dryke didn’t title his competition as a sporting clays tournament, instead naming it the North American Field Shooting Championship. Dryke was an early convert of unconventional targets. He constructed a high tower to add to his mix of skeet and trap targets as early as 1974. Three years later, he offered a “duck tower” and “coot shoot” game.
Hunter’s Clays
The next move on the sporting clays chessboard was again Remington’s. As part of their three-year sporting clay business plan, the gun company brought Chris Cradock to Remington Farms in 1981 to design its first sporting clay course. But they didn’t call it sporting clays, either.
At one of their meetings, the NRA’s Harlon Carter suggested they call it “hunter’s clays” for better name recognition. Remington hosted outdoor writers from across the US to try hunter’s clays at Remington Farms on its new, five-station course consisting of “grouse flush,” “jump shoot,” “springing teal,” “quail rise,” and “pheasant tower.” Afterward, a flurry of syndicated articles appeared in magazines and newspapers heralding the new sport that simulated field shooting situations.
That year, Bob Brister and the NSSF’s Rocky Rohlfing wrote a 16-page booklet called Hunter’s Clays. It described the sport and how to set up an English-style clays course. The brochure was eventually distributed to nearly 200,000 interested shooters and club managers. Together, the Remington Farms press event and the Hunter’s Clays publication created an immediate spike in the number of clubs that introduced sporting clays to their members, although the use of the title “hunter’s clays” in shooting jargon only lasted about a year.
Finding Support For Sporting Clays Competitions
Despite the progress, there were clouds on the horizon. Remington Farms, the logical place to introduce the sport through schools and competition, was reluctant to open its doors to the public. Then, the DuPont Company bought Remington, and in 1984, moved administrative offices to Delaware. Its main sporting clay backers either retired or took other jobs with the company.
By that point, Quinn, who was the principal author of Remington’s three-year sporting clays business plan, had accomplished every piece of the ambitious plan except one—in its last year, 1982, the goal was to sponsor regional championships and a national championship. Because neither the NRA nor the NSSF had the manpower to tackle the time-consuming job as a governing organization for a national competition, the last part of the plan went unrealized.
For a time, it looked as if Orvis might fill the void. Houston Orvis store manager Bryan Bilinski and an instructor from their Vermont headquarters were putting the finishing touches on the new Houston-Pin Oaks Acres Shooting School, one they were laying out as a true, English-style sporting clays course. In 1983, Orvis Company president Leigh Perkins sponsored a clay competition to promote its new venue before the grand opening. Called the 1983 Orvis Cup Classic and held at the Greater Houston Gun Club, Orvis added a dove tower to the club’s skeet and trap offerings. That year, Perkins hired Jay Herbert as the school’s shooting instructor.
Planning The First US Sporting Clays Championship
Sporting clay targets by 1984 were being lobbed at skeet and trap clubs across the country. Although a growing number of clubs were designing sporting clay courses, the game was still short of Brister’s ambition to develop a sanctioned, national championship. The next year, his vision became a reality. In the April 1985 issue of Field & Stream, Brister wrote that Orvis was planning to hold the first “national” tournament, variously called “the first US Sporting Clays Championship” and “the first US Open Sporting Clays Championship,” at its Houston facility.
There are different published versions of who hosted the first national sporting clays tournament in North America. It certainly should have been Orvis—and in some accounts, it was—but Orvis, according to Jay Herbert in an interview, was out of the picture by the time the event was held.
Like Remington before it, Orvis’ reign was too short. Eighteen months after the winding Houston-Pin Oaks Acres course was laid out and the first clays turned to dust, the company lost its lease. Jay Herbert was in the right place at the right time when the lawyer representing the landowners offered the property to him instead. Now he was challenged with hosting a national tournament at his renamed Highland Bend Shooting School, and with little time and no sponsors.
The 1985 National Sporting Clays Championship
Of that first National Sporting Clays Championship venue, Jay Herbert told me:
Bob and I were talking one night about promoting the national championship. We agreed that Bob would put up the publicity and I’d put up the shooting grounds. We needed sponsors, but everybody turned us down, telling me, ‘we know it’s big in England, but the American shooter will never embrace it.’ There was only one person in the shooting industry that had any interest whatsoever in backing it and that was a guy named Tom Ruger, who was the son of Bill Ruger of Ruger firearms. And Tom, bless his heart, gave me five specially engraved guns and $2,500 to publicize it.
Jay fretted. Brister and Gene Hill, shooting editor of Gun Dog Magazine, had publicized the shoot, but there were only three entries ten days before the event. Jay, Brister, and Hill scoured their Rolodexes, personally visiting or telephoning their list of contacts. Their pitch? “We’re having a sporting clays national championship here on May 26, and we’d really like you to come. Never mind what sporting clays is—you’ll really enjoy it.” And they did.
The Event
The 1985 Nationals was a two-day event on Memorial Day weekend with 100 targets on Saturday and 50 on Sunday. In Jay’s words, “in that first National Championship contest we wound up with 78 shooters from 23 states.” Since no sporting clays competitive structure was in place, Jay remembers: “I picked three stations, and let everybody shoot them, and from that, I put them in classes. We had AA, A, B, C, D, and a Ladies and a Junior.”
Today, in a shooting sport with a dizzying number of competitive class categories, it’s refreshing to look back at the winner of that first contest, Andy Banks. He was a duck hunter from southeast Texas and shot his Browning A5 fowling piece.
No Looking Back
The excitement of that first tournament didn’t end when the smoke cleared. Brister didn’t hide his enthusiasm that “the public finally had a chance” to try the sport. He added, “Hopefully this event will get enough media coverage to encourage other to offer public competition.” It did. Within 12 months of the 1985 Highland Bend National Sporting Clays Championship, there were 25 sporting clay courses and 13 tournaments registered with the nascent USSCA.
1985 was a pivotal year. Houston dentist Jim Moore and Houston oil and gas deal promoter Bob Davis took an active role in forming the US Sporting Clays Association (USSCA). Hal DuPont sponsored his “Invitational Sporting Clays Introduction Shoot” at Jay’s Highland Bend Shooting School the same year. The importance of that event is that it introduced some celebrated names from the skeet and trap world to the new game, including Hall of Famer Rudy Etchen, NSSA president Mike Hampton, and Gun Dog Magazine’s Nick Sisley, among others. Hal DuPont would later be credited with founding the National Sporting Clays Association (NCSA) in 1989.
Reflections From Jay Herbert On The 1985 Championship
When Jay looks back at that championship shoot, he credits the mighty pen wielded by Bob Brister as both a Houston Chronicle outdoors writer and Field & Stream editor for his fountain of articles promoting the sport and Jay’s Highland Bend. He also credits Gene Hill who, he says, also published stories about the sport and the next several annual Highland Bend tournaments. Jay also acknowledges Tom Ruger. Of Ruger, he says: “You can’t give Tom enough credit. Without his initial sponsorship, I don’t know if the first tournament would have ever flown.”
Jay adds that Bob Davis, when he was the USSCA president, “asked me to give him space to promote the USSCA organization before my second tournament and he signed up I don’t know how many people.” The volunteers of the USSCA formed the first governing body of the sport in the US. After Jay organized the first four annual Highland Bend National Champion shoots, he turned the reins over to Davis and the USSCA. By then, the original 78 shooters that attended the first tournament had grown to 300.
“The shoot never had trouble getting sponsors after that first one,” he says.