Whenever I hear of the skins game. I think back to the unofficial PGA tour event by the same name that was held from 1983 – 2008 (thanks Wikipedia!).
This event was held at the end of each season and pitted some of the top names in the golfing world against each other. In the skins game, the winner of each hole is awarded a “skin”. If there is a tie on a hole, the skin is carried over to the next hole (and the next if necessary). When a player wins a hole outright, they get the skin for that hole and any carryovers. At the end of the game, each skin is awarded cash! The rules are pretty straightforward.
Sporting clays has often been called “golf with a shotgun” since in sporting clays, we go from station to station much like golfers go from hole to hole. Like golf, sporting clays is a self-paced individual sport where many of the same mental skills apply. So, if the skins game is appropriate for golf, why not for clays? After all, two of the elite level shooters interviewed for previous posts here on the blog indicated that they both used wagers while doing competition practice to make the practice round feel a little more like tournament pressure (if you missed those posts, you can find Grace Callahan’s comments HERE and Dustin Crittenden’s HERE).
Recently, I had the opportunity to try playing the skins game during a joint lesson with my practice partner Randy Donovan. Since we both work with Brian DeMott (if you haven’t seen his post on the blog, feel free to check it out HERE), we had approached him with the idea about doing a joint lesson. He had suggested a simulated competition round. When we met at Kidd’s Place for the lesson, he suggested the skins format. We agreed to play for a shotshell / station meaning that the loser of each station had to immediately hand over a shotshell to the winner. We also decided to allow coaching during the round at any time so we could get the maximum learning potential. Heckling was also allowed! Brian determined the targets to be engaged at each station combining a mix of targets from all 4 traps at each station so that we would be shooting different presentations then we had in earlier practice sessions. Otherwise, we approached the course just as we would normally do with show birds, etc.
How did it go you ask? I really liked it! I think it did a really good job of creating the feel of a real match.
I am sure most of us have experienced some butterflies when we get to the first station. Even though your stomach might be protesting a little, you get in that stand, go through your pre-shot routine and run the station smashing every target (Grace explains how she deals with this in her post)! Why is this? wouldn’t it be better if we were completely relaxed? Well – not exactly. I have mentioned in a couple of previous blog posts about the “inverted U curve”. This curve plots the degree of arousal on the x-axis (so starting from being nearly asleep on the left side to being on the verge of a nervous breakdown on the right) against performance on the Y-axis.
As you can see, being in an uber-relaxed state relates to a lower level of performance than being just a little more excited. The performance keeps climbing along with our arousal level until we hit a peak, after which further arousal causes undue stress resulting in a performance drop. The trick is to figure out each individual’s own level of excitement / arousal that corresponds to getting in the zone where that optimal level of performance occurs – and then figuring out the techniques to bring oneself back to that point when the level of excitement strays either up or down. Having a wager in place helps to generate that little bit of anxiousness that can push one up the curve a little towards that optimum level. As I have mentioned before, humans tend to be very loss-averse meaning that one’s emotional response is a little more pronounced when we lose something then when we win something. That makes the skins game a prefect test bed for gauging one’s own response to the pressure – and then trying to adjust it.
One of the best ways to try to adjust the response is by applying different breathing techniques to either amp oneself up or to create a calming effect. Rapid short breaths help to push one to the right side of the curve, while longer slower, deeper breaths help to move one to the left. I played with this a little during our skins game and was pretty successful in finding just the right degree of excitement to keep sharp while shooting. For example – if Randy did very well on a station as the lead-off shooter, I would feel that pressure to at least match his performance. To counteract that, I would take a few deep breathes before I got in the stand to try to avoid a runaway meltdown scenario where I pushed too far to the right of the graph. Conversely, if you find yourself sagging in the middle of a round, you can take some quick short breaths to energize your emotional level and get back to smashing clays!
Aside from all this arousal / performance talk, the game was just fun! Changing up the way the game is scored feeds the brain that little bit of novelty that it enjoys. Running into a buzz-saw station where you drop a bunch of targets doesn’t ruin the total outcome of the match as you can win that skin back on the next station! It is a little easier to forget a bad station and move on. Practicing moving on from a bad station is a good thing!
Next time you go out to shoot a competition practice round, feel free to give the skins game a try! You might come home with a few extra shotshells and a little more insight into your own performance / arousal curve!