Collegiate Times

Tech junior Andrew Buyalos has his sights set on the orange shell in the air during practice for the clay target club. The club took home first-place honors in the Hokie Invitational. One of the key aspects of success in this sport is to drown out the raucous noise one must make to win.

Tech's clay target team consists of a handful of students who hold practice somewhere between Blacksburg, Christiansburg and Shawsville, in an area that might be better referred to as God's country.

They are a little-known part of the club sports community, but after watching their practice and speaking to some of them, it became apparent that there is much more to clay target shooting than there seems on the surface.

Once you get used to the constant thunder of shells (ear plugs are pretty useful), you can really start to appreciate the sport for its attention to detail.

"This sport teaches focus and concentration," said head coach and National Sporting Clays Association instructor Julie Becker. "Focus, concentration, (and) recovery."

Focus is putting it lightly.  Competitors have to drown out the sound of shells going off all around them, locate the clay (which they refer to as "birds"), track its trajectory and put a shot in the right spot. Of course, then they have to repeat it through the rest of the round, and the following three as well, adding up to 100 different targets, and that's not even including a possible shoot off that can last for even longer.

So far this year, the team has hosted two competitions: a joint student-alumni shoot with Radford University and the Hokie Invitational consisting of six schools with approximately 65 competitors. Tech's team took first place in both shoots, winning the student-alumni shoot by six targets out of 500 and winning the Hokie Invitational by 13 targets from the combined top five scorers. The 13 targets that clinched victory were out of roughly 1,200 total. Vice President David Giammittorio took second place overall at the shoot, losing by one bird.

The repetitiveness of shooting is part of the reason why there isn't much disparity between the top scores. "The skill has to be so good because everybody practices the same targets," Becker said. "It's precise, and so shooting 99 out of 100 is just not that unusual."

"One target, that's all it takes," said Chris Pender, the team president. "(It is) very, very close competition -- it doesn't take much."

The team has ways of training for the high pressure of competition that it uses on a regular basis. Sometimes it is as simple as turning a practice into a competition itself.

On occasion Pender and Giammittorio will bring a prize to practice and have an impromptu competition. "If you just get there and they (say), 'Hi, we're having a competition,' it throws you off," Giammittorio explains. "It teaches you to be able to relax and get that competitive edge up, so when someone says 'competition' your heart doesn't start racing."

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