High Lakes Outdoor Alliance adds skeet field to shooting range

AFTON – Shooters now have another option at the High Lakes Outdoor Alliance shooting range – a new skeet field, which will be usable as early as next week.

“You can shoot pistols and long rifles and .22s and muzzleloaders, and then you can go down and shoot trap at 16 yards all the way back to 27 yards, and now you can shoot another form of entertainment, skeet, and it’s real popular,” said Tom Lesan, High Lakes Outdoor Alliance treasurer.

This year, the 4-year-old shooting range, located north of Afton, has garnered 358 paid members. An annual membership is $45, or shooters can pay $5 for one day at the range.

The $15,000-plus skeet field, paid for with a grant and proceeds from the High Lakes Outdoor Alliance annual banquet, will feature the standard eight stations, a high house launching clay targets at 10 feet and low house launching targets at 3 feet.

“Between the high house and low house, it’s probably 30 yards, and then there’s eight stations and an arch around,” Lesan said.

There are also exterior lights to illuminate the fields for those wanting to shoot after daylight.

Skeet

Skeet shooting is one of three main disciplines of competitive clay-pigeon shooting. The other two are trap shooting and sporting clays. There are several types of skeet, including the internationally recognized Olympic skeet, as well as nationally recognized types.

Skeet is both a recreational and competitive activity in which participants use shotguns to attempt to break clay targets that are mechanically launched into the air from two fixed stations at high speed from various angles.

“In trap, there’s five stations, and you just keep moving – you shoot five targets at each station until you shoot 25,” Lesan said. “With skeet, at two of the eight locations, the target’s coming right at you. They also throw pairs, which cross. They do all kinds of different things, and everyone says it’s the most like hunting because you really have to get your leads and your follow-throughs. I think that’s why it’s so popular; it gets people ready for hunting season.”

In skeet, a participant shoots from seven positions on a semicircle and an eighth position halfway between stations one and seven. There are two houses that hold devices known as traps, which launch targets – one at each corner of the semicircle.

One trap launches targets from 10 feet above the ground, the high house, and the other launches from 3 feet, the low house.

“In trap, you’re moving away from the target,” Lesan said. “In skeet, you’re moving more in that arch around and you’re shooting different angles. The targets are thrown the same way every time in skeet; in trap, you never know which way they’re coming. So, there’s a big difference between that and knowing where it is and then getting your lead right like in skeet.”

SWCC shooters

The shooting range will now give the Southwestern Community College sports shooting team a local place to practice both trap and skeet.

“Normally, if we were going to do (skeet) before, we’d either have to travel up to Indianola or Waukee or down to Mount Ayr’s private skeet set-up,” said Marc Roberg, SWCC head sports shooting coach and vice president of High Lakes Outdoor Alliance.

Roberg said Iowa’s junior college conference for shooting was thinking about starting skeet beginning as a virtual league, in which participants would shoot on their home field, their scores would get entered and then, in the future, they would travel and shoot skeet against another school face-to-face.

“Now, this will give us the opportunity to practice where we wouldn’t have had the chance to before,” Roberg said. “Also, it’ll help us when it comes down to nationals ... where they do shoot skeet. (Students) will be somewhat experienced in shooting skeet.”

Community shooters

Roberg said the skeet field will also be beneficial to other local shooters – both those who are competitive and those who just shoot for fun.

“Right now, with the trap range out there, we have leagues on Wednesday night and we get a tremendous amount of use out there at that range. This is just going to double it,” Roberg said. “Skeet is a really fun, really popular sport, and I think it’s going to draw a lot of people from the Creston area and the central Iowa area. We get people as far as Des Moines coming down and sometimes even from Missouri. It’ll be a bigger draw because it’s a lot of fun, and there aren’t a lot of skeet fields around.”

Lesan added: “There are gun clubs like the one in Waukee, but there’s just so many people out there, and some are willing to drive a little bit farther to Creston to get away from the crowd. Plus, most of those clubs, you can’t shoot out to 600 yards and you can here. I think skeet will be one more thing we can use to recruit more members.”

More and more, the shooting range is drawing people “from all walks of life,” Lesan said.

“We get bankers to UPS drivers and everyone in between,” he said. “Anyone can shoot. Just come out and try it, and we’d love to teach you.”