The Midwest Shooting School
Clear Creek Outdoors, Inc.
(BLOG)
Truly shooting well involves something other than memorizing leads or choosing chokes and shot sizes. It involves applying elegantly simple theories about what you should see and how you and your shotgun should move...
There’s a certain feeling to shooting this way, a feeling you’ll want to duplicate every time you pick up a gun. It’s almost magical...
Introduction
You’ll come to know and appreciate that feeling, and uncover your natural shooting abilities, here at The Midwest Shooting School.
My name is Patrick LaBoone, owner and instructor at The Midwest Shooting School. The school’s home shooting grounds are part of Clear Creek Outdoors, Inc., the hunting club my wife Sue and I started and have owned since 1983. Clear Creek is just minutes south of Duluth, Minnesota and the scenic shores of Lake Superior.
Wingshooting and sporting clays instruction is given on Clear Creek’s sporting clays course, which gun writer Michael McIntosh has described in Wing & Shot as “superb”. The course offers an endless variety of shots and challenges for world class competitors, while staying true to the concept that sporting clays is a hunters’ game. For a student of wingshooting or sporting clays, this may be the finest single teaching venue in the country. For much of the year, there is the opportunity to finish instruction in technique and field etiquette while hunting in the fields and woods of Clear Creek....
Instruction is available on our home grounds on an hourly, half-day, single-day or multi-day basis, year-round. If you prefer, I may come to you... see Traveling Schools.
I learned the f
I learned the fundamentals of the method I teach from wingshooting instructor Jack Mitchell of Cornwall, England. I first met Jack in 1987 or 1988, and began instructing at his urging that same year...
Jack gave me the fundamentals to build on. Because I would see him for only a week or so twice a year, I had to learn to apply this technique to many shots on my own... the struggling I had to do made me look inward, deepening my understanding and confidence in the principles behind the method. I never doubted this method from the first moments when it was introduced to me, but I had to learn what it meant to apply it’s principles to every shot. Looking back, that first summer was both painful and immensely rewarding.
Without the struggling along the way, I would be a less effective teacher today.
Over the years, I have taught in numerous states, and several countries on a variety of shotgunning formats... game shooting, sporting clays, flyers, trap, skeet, olympic trap and international skeet. While I would consider myself a wingshooting or down-gun coach, there are certain truths in this method that apply to all shotgunning disciplines. Are you ready to apply them in your shotgunning?
Patrick LaBoone
featuring Shotgunning Instruction by Patrick LaBoone