Slumps, Streaks, And Head Games

The following is a pass-along newsletter article from the Pointing Dog Journal.

Pass Along PDJ
July 2009

Slumps, Streaks, and Head Games
by Steve Smith

I don’t know for sure who it is I’m paraphrasing here - sounds like Yogi Berra - but I think if you think about it, you’ll agree that 90 percent of wingshooting is half mental.

If a skeet shooter can break 23 out of 25 every time out, and 25 of 25 now and then, why can’t he get those last two every time out? He knows the skeet field stays the same and that the station 6 low house is going to look almost identical to every other 6 low he’s ever seen. But some days he hits it and some days he misses it.

Or take a Texas quail hunter who’s been doing it for 40 years - do you think he hasn’t seen just about everything a quail can do in the air, and do you think he hasn’t figured out how to handle them? But some days he can’t hit the ground if he dropped his gun.

These sorts of things bother a lot of people, me included. I could stone 10 straight rooster pheasants in South Dakota, but if I missed four straight after that, I’d start feeling as though I’ll never hit another one, the streak of 10 all but forgotten. I used to hunt with a fellow who, if he missed a few birds in a row, would chuckle and remark that he’d killed more of them than they have of him. I wish I could be that way; most of us aren’t.

Any physical activity requiring eye-hand coordination - just about any sport you can think of and certainly any requiring you to use an imple­ment: golf, tennis, baseball, shooting - are subject to slumps, inexplicable failures to do easily what you’ve nearly always done easily in the past. In shoot­ing, like in the rest of these sports, those slumps are hard to figure out because nothing changes - same dog, same bird, same gun, same cover, but now we can’t hit ‘em.

Barring some physical change such as dimming eyesight or loss of strength and mobility due to age or illness, slumps are in our heads. And it’s in our heads that we have to solve them. Usually, a physical problem that affects our shooting manifests itself in a gradual, long-term decline, not in a sudden string of oh-fers this Saturday when last Saturday your left barrel came home clean. 

If you’re a paid subscriber, you can read the rest of this article in the subscribers’ only section of our website at  www.pointingdogjournal.com. Set up your own username and password by registering an account using your Customer Number 10000416, and then click on “Features” to read more.

If you’re not a subscriber, change that now! Once you become a paid subscriber, a whole new section of our website will open up to you once you register an account, and you’ll be able to read all of our stored content from previous web articles and video.

If you haven’t already, check out The Pointing Dog Journal on both Twitter and  Facebook! So sign up and become a fan, and invite your social networking pals to become fans and followers, too! And maybe drop a hint that, if they haven’t already, they should request their own no-obligation issue!

Please do us a tremendous favor and forward this e-mail on to your pointing dog friends!