Desirae Edmunds joined me this week and we discussed one topic that most of us should all pay more attention to…Practice. From how and how much to when and where and how to make it work for you. Practicing plays such a vital role in your success as a clay target shooter. Find out how to make your practice more beneficial to you and your scores.
On this episode, I have 2 good friends out of North Carolina. These guys shoot together a lot and have won their fair share of tournaments around the southeast. Wesley is a 4x North Carolina State Champion and is also in the North Carolina Sporting Clays Hall of Fame. Richard came off of an incredible 2021 winning HOA at Georgia State, South Carolina State, and Virginia State among many others.
Lefty Ray Chapa is a professional freelance outdoor photographer and writer, and you’ve seen his work in Clay Target Nation during the past couple of years. As the official photographer of the NSSA and NSCA, Lefty has traveled all over the U.S. photographing skeet and sporting clays events. Through pure coincidence, he lives just miles from the National Shooting Complex in San Antonio.
Lefty photographs anything having to do with a fly rod or a shotgun. His work has appeared in American Waterfowler magazine, Southwest Fly Fishing magazine, Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine, Texas Highways magazine, the San Antonio Express-News newspaper, and many more. He currently authors the “Lefty’s Blind Bag” column in American Waterfowler magazine.
He has won numerous national awards in photography from the Outdoor Writers of Association of America (OWAA) and numerous regional awards from the Texas Outdoor Writers Association (TOWA). His favorite award-winning photo is the silhouette of his wife and grandson against the sunrise that appeared in a recent Kent cartridge catalog centerfold.
Lefty Ray is also the credited photographer on two Grammy-winning albums and more than a dozen Grammy and Latin Grammy-nominated albums. In the music industry, he is known as the guy who fell off a speaker in Las Vegas while on assignment during the Tex Mex Fest Tour.
If you follow social media, you might have seen his images on Instagram or Facebook for companies like Kent Cartridge, Franchi, Fiocchi, Benelli, Syren, Hevi-Shot, Drake Waterfowl, Shimano, G. Loomis, and others.
When not shooting with a camera, he is casting a fly to tail redfish on the nearby Texas coast during the summer or knocking down ducks with a shotgun during the winter. His motto during waterfowl season is, “No duck blind is too far, too crowded, or too cold.”
You can find Lefty on Instagram at lefty.ray.chapa, on Facebook as Lefty Ray, on Twitter as @LeftyRay, or via email at leftyray@leftyray.com. And if you see him behind the lens at an event, give him a thumbs-up and a smile.
In this episode, we talk about shooting glasses which is a big topic of conversation in our sport, and do you need as many lenses as you think you do. Dr. Colo explains the Purkinje effect which is sometimes called the Purkinje shift. If you are wondering that is…..it is the changes in perception of the relative lightness and darkness of different colors as illumination changes.
If you are interested in seeing Dr. Colo, he tells us where he will be in the upcoming year and how to contact him.
In this episode, we talk about eye dominance which is a huge topic of conversation in our sport. Dr. Colo tries to explain it even more so that we all can understand how it really works. We talk about how to use the eyes to slow down a target, we talk a little about helice and how eye dominance may not be an issue with anyone in this game, and a lot more. The second part of this episode will be released next week.
Bill Elliott is an NSCA Level 3 instructor and a shotgun coach. He has a very interesting story on how he got involved in the sport coming out of the academic field, he tells me where he wants to be in the sport and what he is going to do to get there.
In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized the formation of the Army Marksmanship Unit, almost exclusively to win shooting competitions that would raise the standards of marksmanship throughout the Army. The unit is composed of five competitive shooting sections, each with world-class training facilities and competition grounds. Those teams include Service Rifle, Action Shooting, International Rifle, Service Pistol, and Shotgun.
Will Hinton, part of the shotgun unit, grew up with a shotgun in his hand and competed all over the USA in sporting clays competitions and the PSCA before entering the AMU. Will has been part of the Army Marksmanship Shotgun Unit for five years as a shooter/instructor and now competes all over the world in bunker trap. January 2022 will lead to a promotion in the Army as Staff Sergeant where he will continue his career and live out his passion for shotgun shooting.
Mike Wilgus is from Bellevue Washington. He’s a businessman a family man and one of the best shooters in the game. Competition is what he lives for and his resume is there to prove it. He is a 6x Team USA member, 36 x all American, and 2x us open champion.
White Flyer operates five state-of-the-art target manufacturing facilities throughout the United States to ensure total coverage of the country plus Canada and Mexico: Coal Township, PA Plant, (Northeast U.S.) | Dalton, GA Plant (Southeast U.S.) | Webb City, MO Plant, (Central U.S.) | Knox, IN Plant, (North Central U.S.) – San Bernardino, CA Plant, (Western U.S.)
Utilizing a customer base of coast to coast, border to border, and beyond, White Flyer currently serves more gun clubs and shooters than any other target manufacturer in the world.
Using state-of-the-art production methods, White Flyer continues to make technical advances that will allow it to maintain its position and continually improve our target quality.
My guests today are all from the Southeast and finished in the top 15 at Nationals. They are hard-working, serious shooters that want to be the best they can be. This will be a different style episode as I had the coach and the students on in the same show. Listen to how they interact with one another, how well they get along, and push each other to be great. Remember I said this….You will see their names towards the top of every leaderboard for the tournaments they attend in 2022.