You may have heard of sporting clays referred to as golf with a shotgun, and that’s a fair comparison. Like golf courses, no two sporting clays courses are alike, and terrain and background have a lot to do with how targets are presented. Sporting clays is the closest thing to actual field shooting of all shotgun sports. Rather than having clay birds thrown from standardized distances and angles as with skeet or trap, sporting clays courses are designed to simulate the hunting of ducks, pheasants, other upland birds, and even rabbits.
There are approximately 600 NSCA member clubs in the US.