Cockett Farm Shooting Ground
Sporting
The Sporting disciplines are by far the most popular in the UK and each of the main sub disciplines is featured at Cockett Farm.
While the other disciplines only use standard targets and are set to agreed standards for target height, distance and angles, in Sporting almost anything goes! The discipline was originally devised to simulate live quarry shooting with targets thrown in an almost infinite variety of trajectories. Many stands on a sporting range will still commonly use traditional terminology to define the targets such as Springing Teal, Driven Pheasant, Bolting Rabbit, Crossing Pigeon, Dropping Duck, etc.
More recently the discipline has moved away from replicating real game scenarios to become more of a test of shooters ability by presenting targets that would not be seen in the wild. Rabbits running across a pond or pigeons powered vertically downwards are just a couple of the new ingenious ways that have bewildered shooters at recent major events.
A sporting course usually consists of several stands, each featuring three, four or five pairs of different targets which may be thrown together or on report, where the second target is sent when a shot is fired at the first target.
English Sporting
Cockett Farm's sporting course features 50 targets set over 7 stands in a mixture of lightly wooded, sloping and open terrain. We use a variety of target types and colours together with several fixed and mobile towers to deliver a challenging and entertaining course that appeals to novices and experienced shots alike.
Sportrap / White Gold
This is essentially a miniature English Sporting layout and is also known as Compak Sporting, with the only real difference between the two being slightly different rules.
The White Gold was a competition devised by the Cockett Farm's founder Roger Collingham. The Gamebore cartridge company sponsored the event to coincide with the launch of their range of White Gold cartridges. In order to ensure that the event was both easy for grounds to host and TV crews to film, the competition was based around a standard skeet range and is widely acknowledged as the format that inspired the current Sportrap discipline. At it's peak, shooting grounds held their own qualifying events with the finals held in front of the Sky TV cameras at Weston Park with a prize fund of £25000.
There are 5 stands in a line with five targets thrown on each stand. 5 traps are used and a board in front of each stand will inform the shooter of the order and combination of targets which normally consists of a single target, a report pair and a simultaneous pair.
Cockett Farm has two Sportrap ranges, one of which is under cover.
FITASC
FITASC is the international version of sporting and is named after the organisation that governs the discipline. Generally this is considered to be the most demanding of the sporting disciplines, for two main reasons. Firstly the gun must be held out of the shoulder until the target becomes visible and secondly each individual target will only be seen a maximum of twice per shooting stand. In English sporting you may have up to 5 opportunities to shoot the same target(s) per stand. In FITASC you only get one chance!
