New challenge
The Coeur d’Alene Skeet and Trap club recently experienced some skwobbling among its members and with the roster close to 900, something had to be done.
“Our members asked for something different,” said board member JD Owen. The most trendy of the shotgun sports today is arguably sporting clays. Played over acres of ground, shooters travel relatively long distances from one shooting station to another, often by golf cart.
The Coeur d’Alene club is landlocked on a patch of ground near the Coeur d’Alene Airport and unable to provide sporting clays stations. In search of a fun but challenging alternative, club member Mike Garrett researched other options. Through an Internet search of “wobble skeet” he came up with a few ideas.
“You really have to experience it,” mused Garrett in talking about the challenge of the two new games at the club, wobble skeet and skwobble as they are now known. “There is no doubt it is harder than sporting clays,” he continued.
Both new games are shot from skeet positions called stations. Two of the club’s four skeet fields have been modified to accommodate the new games.
Wobble skeet has been described as taking the boring out of regular skeet. This game utilizes the same high and low houses as skeet shooting but with modified house openings. A corner is cut out of the house for a gyrating clay target launcher to sling the brightly colored orange disks over a 60- to 75-degree arc instead of the predictable path skeet targets follow. A low house target from the first shooting station can be a 50-yard shot. Targets may appear from either house at close to eye level, or they may rocket skyward just like a quail or pheasant. But, this breed of pigeon travels almost twice as fast as their skeet cousin, reaching speeds close to 80 miles per hour.
Speed and target unpredictability also are components of the game dubbed skwobble. As with wobble skeet, players shoot from the skeet stations, which means a sharper shooting angle than from standard trap stations. But in the game of skwobble, that same gyrating clay target launcher is located in the trap house. With the extremely wide and unpredictable field of flight combined with the vertical variances, a clay target can seemingly fly right over you, you may even duck, only to see the crash of the fluorescent orange orb downrange in your field of fire.
In the brief history of the games, no one has connected with 25 targets in a row playing wobble skeet and only two perfect scores of 25 have been posted by skwobble players.
A transplant from the Denver area, Owen appreciates the North Idaho culture.
“We were lucky to get 30 people out in the winter,” he said about his Colorado club. “Here we have almost 700 shooters posting scores in the winter leagues.”
Although mostly a male clientele, women are finding their own niche in the sport. For the first time, an all-female skeet team competed in the
winter league last year. Instructional days for women only, offering support and shooting tips, are held on a regular basis.
“A lot of women want to learn to shoot but don’t want to learn in front of their boyfriend or husband,” said Garrett.
Family participation is growing at the club and encouraged by the members. Joe Benjamin, of Post Falls, spent his birthday shooting with his two sons, Joe, 14, and Matthew, 12.
“Some clubs don’t like the little kids around,” said Benjamin, “But these guys take my kids and challenge them.”
The father and sons shot 50 clay pigeons each of skwobble and wobble skeet with Tom Ellefson from Hayden during a recent tournament. Coaching the boys between stations, Ellefson eloquently explained the importance of leading the target, squeezing the trigger, and having confidence in making the shot.
“These guys are great” said the elder Benjamin, “and I learn, too.”
The requests for something different at the Coeur d’Alene area shooting sports club fell on attentive ears and the changes made so far are everything to skwobble about.