Three thousand young shooters in San Antonio for a week. The 2023 SCTP Nationals was both an event and a referendum on where American clay target sports are heading. The honest read on the week is that the discipline is in better shape than the older All-American team observers expected.
The depth of the high-school and college fields was the headline. The number of first-generation shooters in the brackets, kids whose parents had never shot a clay, was the quieter story. The program's outreach is working in places where it had not historically reached.
This piece is the on-the-ground report from the week, plus the SCTP staff's read on where the program goes next.
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