MidHudsonSportingClays

Skeet was invented by Charles Davies, an avid grouse hunter, in 1915 as a sport called Clock Shooting. The original course was a circle with a radius of 25 yards with its circumference marked off like the face of a clock and a trap set at the 12 o’clock position. The practice of shooting from all directions had to cease, however, when a chicken farm started next door. The game evolved to its current setup by 1923 when one of the shooters, William Harnden Foster, solved the problem by placing a second trap at the 6 o’clock position and cutting the course in half. Foster quickly noticed the appeal of this kind of competition shooting, and set out to make it a national sport. The game was introduced in the February 1926 issue of National Sportsman and Hunting and Fishing magazines and a prize of 100 dollars was offered to anyone who could come up with a name for the new sport. The winning entry was "skeet" chosen by Gertrude Hurlbutt. The word "skeet" is derived from the Scandinavian word for "shoot". During World War II, Skeet was used in the American military to teach gunners the principle of leading and timing on flying target.

Skeet is a recreational and competitive activity where participants attempt to break clay disks flung into the air at high speed from a variety of angles. For the American version of the game, the clay discs are 4 and 5/16 inches in diameter, one and 1/8 inches thick, and fly a distance of 60 yards (+/- 2 yards). The international version of skeet uses a target that is slightly larger in diameter (110mm), shorter in cross section (25mm vs. 1 1/8 inches), and has a thicker dome center, making it harder to break. International targets are also thrown a longer distance from similar heights (over 70 yards), resulting in a faster target speed.

The firearm of choice for this task is usually a high quality, double-barreled over and under shotgun. Some gun shops refer to this type of shotgun as a skeet gun, a sporter gun or a trap gun although many shooters of American skeet and other national versions still use inexpensive semi-auto and pump action shot guns with great success. The use of clay targets replaced the more traditional target of live birds, as a cheaper, more humane and more reliable alternative, one reason they are also called clay pigeons.