The Simpson College Shotgun Shooting Sports team is a year-round team, competing in both the fall and spring semesters. Currently, the team has 11 athletes consisting of seven men and four women. The team mainly competes in the Midwest, but will finish their season in San Antonio, Texas at nationals.
Head coach Dan Martin spoke on how the team is deeply rooted in discipline, focus and teamwork.
“With a smaller team, we can work more individually to see what we need to work on for each athlete, to maximise our full potential,” Martin said.
Simpson junior, and co-team captain, Wyatt Shoaf, said the team feels like family.
“With the team being on the smaller size, it feels more like a family, we work together and have each other’s back,” Shoaf said.
The sport can create fear for people who do not know much about it, as the main tool used is a shot gun. However, shooting sports is an Olympic sport and is just as competitive and challenging as any other sport.
“The tool we use can be dangerous, if used in the wrong way. Our athletes are trained to safely use their shotguns, taking the fear out of the question” Martin said.
Shotgun sport events are scored as a team and as individuals. At competitions, the team’s top five scores are used to bracket the competition. Individually, athletes can be ranked in the top three men and top three women scorers of the day.
Simpson competes against a wide range of schools.
“We compete against everyone,” Martin said. “Anyone from D1 to D3 or any other program can come to our competitions.”
The team competes in three disciplines at every meet: trap, skeet and sporting clays. Each discipline presents a uniquely different challenge.
Trap focuses on a single house launching clay pigeons in the air, with five athletes rotating positions every 25 shots.
“Trap is a passive event while the others are more aggressive,” Shoaf said.
Skeet is shot on a semi-circular field with eight stations. Targets are launched from two houses that sit parallel to each other. The houses have a low and high house which causes the birds to be very unpredictable.
Sporting clays, which is often compared to golf, has athletes walk along a course with different stations. Birds are thrown from different angles, distances and speeds all differing at each station. Along with different terrains, it requires sharp focus.
“You never know what kind of presentation you will get, which is why we utilize our simulator in practice,” Martin said. “We are able to manipulate things such as wind speed and direction, sun brightness, clouds in the sky and many other things.”
With the team getting ready to head to nationals, they have been practicing with settings focused on the terrain they will be presented with in March.
The 2025 team took home 2nd place in Division III nationals, and the 2024 team won the national championship.
“This is a young team, but I feel they are the best team I have coached, we are working on building their trust with each other, you always have ups and downs with a team, but things feel good for this year’s Nationals,” Martin said.
National’s will be the final competition of the year for the team until next fall. When the season is over, they will begin focusing and looking forward to improvements for the upcoming season.
“When the dust settles at the end of the year after Nationals, we take a step back and start focusing on the new year and new things we can improve on,” Martin said.
