History of Sporting Clays and 5-Stand

With its roots coming from England, sporting clays is a shotgun shooting game in which clay pigeons are presented to the gunner in ways that mirror the flight pattern of game birds, or occasionally rabbits, in their natural habitats. The shooting grounds are laid out in stations (also called stands or butts, the British term) with each station representing one type of bird or a combination of game; a rabbit and a grouse, for example.

Wingshooting or bird hunting with a shotgun had its origins in England in the mid-eighteenth century. The next century saw live pigeon shoots become popular, reaching their peak toward the end of the Victorian era, when one's ability to handle a gun had definite social implications. American inventor George Ligowski invented a replacement for live birds in 1880 made of baked clay and modeled after the clamshells he used to skim across water. Ligowski's clay pigeon quickly replaced feather-filled balls, the only other alternative to live birds, and just as quickly replaced the real thing.

The first clay pigeon game, which imitated live pigeon shooting, was called trap, after the device used to hold and release live birds. Next, a new shooting game called skeet was developed in New England (America) which was designed to approximate the fast, close-range shooting found in that area's grouse hunting. Meanwhile back in England, the demand to perform at estate shoots on driven game gave rise to a number of shooting schools. These schools, in turn, adapted Ligowski's clay pigeon to use on practice fields of targets that approximated the flight of live quarry, as the English like to call it. Sporting clays was born.

Although the British Open, England's premier sporting clays competition, dates back to 1925, sporting clays has made its greatest gains in popularity in England within the last 20 years. Meanwhile it took a while for the sport to make it to America. In 1985, the Orvis Company hosted the first national sporting clays championship at its Houston facilities, for which the company established the Orvis Cup. It was then that Sporting clays had come to America.  5-Stand was established in 1985 and the NSSA was founded in March of 1989.

Sources:  sportingclays.net, en.wikipedia.org, clay targets online, clay shooter magazine

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