Lessons from the OSP Shooting School at Milford Hills
My shooting, whether in the field or on the clays course, easily could be summed up in one word: mediocre. Yes, there were occasional glimpses of what I’d proudly call near-brilliant hits, but they typically were followed by exponentially more soul-crushing misses. In private, this was frustrating but tolerable; but in the company of others, it was downright embarrassing. Decades of private lessons from professionals and friends along with annual New Year’s resolutions to get serious and hit the clays course had yielded nothing but the same roller-coaster results.
This past year I decided to take it up a notch by attending Gil, Brian and Vicki Ash’s Optimum Shotgun Performance (OSP) Shooting School at Milford Hills, in Wisconsin. This was to be my defining moment, where I could leave behind years of torment and a lifetime of mediocrity.
In the months leading up to the school, I committed to gearing up with a better gun (a Blaser F3) and the right accessories (quality shooting glasses and custom earplugs) as well as by hitting the nearby sporting clays course. I also subscribed to OSP’s Knowledge Vault, an online portal containing thousands of OSP-produced video tutorials, animations, podcasts, articles and tips for shooting everything from clays to doves and quail.
Weeks before I was to fly to Wisconsin, I received an email strongly encouraging me to begin using the Vault to practice for the school. One of the essential exercises is something that the Ashes colloquially call the “3-Bullet Drill.” It’s simple: Stand three shotgun shells upright about three feet apart on a shelf or ledge 15 feet away. Stare hard at, say, the far-right shell as you mount your gun to meet the center shell. Do this over and over, making sure to do the same thing with the far-left shell. The idea is that all shots can be boiled down to two sight planes: You’re either looking across your barrel(s) to see the target or looking at the target to the left of your barrel (if you’re a righthanded shooter). Think about it: With a bird quartering from right to left, if a righthanded shooter wants to start his gun moving in front of the target, that means he has to look across the rib to see the target. That doesn’t sound tricky, but for many of us the barrel interference can be just enough to lose track of the target—with all kinds of mishaps flowing from that one little, easily correctable glitch.
With hours of video watching and concerned glances from my wife under my belt, I made my way first to Madison, Wisconsin, and then to Milford Hills, about 45 minutes away. As I stepped from the car, I found myself looking across a surprisingly stunning farmscape. The early German and Scandinavian settlers left an indelible mark on this fertile area. The farms and houses appeared lovingly cared for, and Milford Hills owner Lloyd Marks and his team obviously felt the same pride of place.
Known around the Upper Midwest as a top destination for sporting clays and wingshooting, Milford Hills opened in 1996. What started as a modest 200-acre destination has grown and grown. The restaurant offers dramatic vistas across the glacier-carved farmland and a game-infused menu that helps make the property a top destination for everything from corporate retreats to weddings.
The shooting grounds include two 12-station, key-carded sporting clays courses and a 5 Stand setup as well as 13 hunting fields planted in switchgrass, sorghum and corn. Hunting is for pheasants, chukar and bobwhites over well-trained German shorthaired and wirehaired pointers, English setters, Brittanys and Labs.
But as enamored as I was by the idea of hunting come fall, I was here to focus on straightening out my shooting and quieting those negative inner voices. At OSP, mornings begin with classroom instruction, with Gil and Vicki introducing students—typically eight to 10 per day—to their singular methods of improving performance. If my instruction to that point could have been considered bachelor’s level, this felt like graduate work. By the end of the first session, my mind was swimming first with encouragement to use OSP’s signature “apex move” (more later), and then by adjustments to my shooting positioning and the lowering of my adjustable comb.
By the time I stepped into the shooter’s box on one of Milford Hills’ sporting clays courses—and with a gallery of eager shooters looking over my shoulder—I felt like a beginner all over again. Truth be told, I felt worse than that. Instinct had been replaced with a noisy brain, drum-tight muscles and pulsing nerves. And this inner tsunami sparked one of my first realizations: I’d forgotten how to a be a student. As we get older, we become inflexible in virtually every way. I wanted to doubt—even blame—the Ashes as I began missing easy target after easy target, whether it was fading straightaway or even crossing slowly. I wondered why I had gone through with this, saying to myself that my shooting wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t that bad. I really was a mess. As Gil said as I expressed some remorse: “I know you like to think you’re special, but the reality is that you’re just normal. Everyone goes through this at one time or another.” It was marginally reassuring.
The first morning continued this way for most of the students: some success followed by wincing failures. But through all of the ups and downs and as shooter after shooter took his or her turn, Vicki’s sweet Texas voice offering instruction mixed with encouragement slowly took hold. She taught us to slow down, start the gun moving sooner, get (and stay) in front of the target, look hard at the target and visualize—and succeed—in finishing the final 15 to 20 percent of the shot. Shot after shot—successful or not—was creating memory and, as Gil said, those memories would sink in and create knowledge. The key is to internalize good habits and the right techniques, so that you’re programming yourself with success, not failed ideas and movements. Throughout the school, this applied to multiple presentations, near and far.
Over the course of the two days, not once did we shoot at simultaneous or even report pairs. The exercise was to load the gun with only one shell, take the shot and repeat. Get it right. Get it down. Figure out why you were hitting as well as why you were missing. If you’re training yourself right, you’ll never have to turn to anyone and ask, “How’d I miss that?” You’ll just know. And that’s where sustained success takes root.
And here’s another Gil-ism: “the law of recency,” where your mind recalls the things you’ve done most recently. So create new vision, new memory, new movement and new confidence, and that will inform what comes next. Makes sense, right?
After all that processing, lunch was a welcome distraction. But soon we were ready to get back out there and replace those bad habits and equally bad misses with successes. Slowly but surely, the overprogrammed mind started to slow down—and so seemingly did the targets. “Soft hands,” Vicky would whisper when she’d see someone gripping a gun with equal parts nervousness and frustration. To another shooter: “Get your head up and off the stock to see the target before settling in. You’re a bunch of moving parts. Use them.” And to me: “Move the gun sooner. The target is getting out in front of you. Remember: You don’t need to start with the gun frozen. Get it moving sooner, and stay in front. The target will look and act slower. Jump to catch up, and it will be like a car flying past you on the freeway. You want to move at the speed of the target without hurrying.” There were subtle, bedrock reminders: Set your break point; lift your head and find the target sooner; and always, always move your gun deliberately and smoothly.
Optimum Shotgun Performance
Optimum Shotgun Performance (OSP) is a comprehensive shooting school and online resource created by Gil, Brian and Vicki Ash. In the 1980s Gil and Vicki were competitive shooters, but when Gil suffered a shoulder injury in 1990, their attention shifted to training and coaching. Since then they have been joined by their son Brian, and the three have taught thousands of shooters across three continents using a system that combines methods for optimizing sight lines and gun movement. OSP offers a combination of shooting clinics, tele-consults, private lessons and personal gunfittings, and the company’s extensive Knowledge Vault consists of thousands of video tutorials, ShotKam footage and animated graphics.
That last point, for me, was the revelation. For years I’d started my gun like an aging and overweight greyhound jumping out of the gate—already behind the target, racing to catch up, desperately trying to match the target’s speed and track, swinging in front, and finally pulling the trigger. Sometimes it had worked, but mostly it had been exhausting and frustrating. It became clearer and clearer that this method created an optical challenge, with the bird becoming a blur as I sped to and then away from it. All those speed changes as I played catch-up made the shot so much harder than it actually was. When I started in front, stayed in front, quieted my mind and let my subconscious and muscle memory create the lead and inform the shot, things started getting easier and easier. Sure, I was still missing targets that I felt I should have been hitting, but things were beginning to make sense. I finished the first day smashing a string of targets that I’d missed hours earlier.
That night I went to bed eager to take full advantage of another day of instruction and nearly unlimited shooting. I was tired but buoyed by possibility. And when I woke the next morning, I smiled as I realized that I’d spent a good portion of my REM sleep dreaming of different targets. Racing rabbits, soaring chandelles, rapidly falling crossers, wind-grabbing battues—all the targets I’d been missing were showing up in my subconscious. When I told Gil this after breakfast, his mouth widened into a grin and he said, “You’re welcome.”
The second morning was filled with more videos and animations. Gil showed us how to create a separate and shorter ascending line to move ahead of a target near the top of its flight—the apex move—time and time again. He mixed in scientific studies and TED Talk clips to illustrate how our vision creates realities that help—and at times confuse—us as we make sense of the world around us. He answered questions and helped us untangle things that had bedeviled us, sometimes for years. This was heady but logical stuff.
“What we teach has all been proven by science,” Gil said. “Our goal for you is to create the skill-building that isolates circuits in the brain and then re-sequence them to subconsciously hit a moving target with a shotgun without thinking. We prime our students with words like ‘challenge,’ ‘apex’ and ‘catch’ to trigger a subconscious movement. I say, ‘Catch,’ and after you’ve practiced enough you intuitively know how softly to collect that target right where you want it. You really can’t think your way through this, because the thinking slows you down and leaves you one-third of a second behind.”
And with that doctorate-level optometry, kinesiology and psychotherapy, I spent the next six hours with Gil and one other student who had been attending OSP’s schools at Milford Hills for several years. We went station to station—Gil whispering simple words like “apex,” and my shooting would adjust. And as the presentations got harder, my shooting got better. I ran station after station with nary a miss. I became no longer satisfied just to hit a target; I wanted to fully dominate it. Occasionally my mind would glitch like a coffee-soaked smartphone, but then sometimes with Gil’s prodding and increasingly with my own inner wisdom, I’d get back on track.
As the final day was drawing to a close, feeling more like a precocious teenager than a middle-aged Don Quixote, I communicated to Gil how shocked I was by my new-found success. “You’re welcome,” he jokingly blurted out.
“But wait,” I said, “I’m the one who . . . .”
Gil smiled and cut me off as only a Texan can and said, “See you next year.”
For more information on Optimum Shotgun Performance, visit ospschool.com. For more on Milford Hills, visit milfordhills.com.
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