John Shima on Forty Years Behind a Trigger

John Shima shot his first sporting course in the early 1980s, when sporting clays in America was still a niche discipline shared by a few clubs and a few stubborn enthusiasts. Forty years later, he has watched the discipline mature into the largest target sport in the country.

The piece is Shima on what changed, what stayed the same, and what gets lost when a small community grows into a national circuit. He is candid about the All-American teams, the way young shooters approach the gun differently than his generation did, and the trade-offs of professionalization.

For anyone who came to sporting clays in the last decade, this conversation is a useful piece of context on where the discipline actually came from.

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