Final Deer Creek Sporting Clays Update March 17th 2010

Well that was a fast five years! Cathy and I have enjoyed the time we spent at Deer Creek, and with all of you who came out to enjoy the sport of clay shooting.

A local paper interviewed us on our last day and our summary was – “it has been 99% good and not many things in life are that good”. We are ready to move on to new things and we wish the new operators of the club all the best in the world.

We feel sure that Mike Mezrah and Bill Arthur will continue the traditions of Deer Creek and we look forward to shooting and coaching at Tampa Bay Sporting Clays. Their new website is www.mytbsc.com

We have many happy memories of the charity shoots and the corporate events, the bachelor parties and birthday parties we have hosted and those memories will stay with us. We averaged over 33 events a year and the charities raised almost

$3 million together over the 5 years.

Our first customer five years ago was Bob Showalter and our last customer to check out on Sunday was Herb Donica and his son Andrew all of whom have been regulars along our journey. We have seen them many times over the years and many of you too – we appreciate the loyal following we had and we are very grateful to you for your support. It would fill a huge mail if we were to thank everyone who has shot with us over the five years and we would be sure to miss someone important, but please accept our gratitude and best wishes for more smoked targets.

We were very lucky to have had the staff and helpers over the years that made Deer Creek run so well. All our full time staff averaged more than  two and a half years with us, Dakota has been with us for three and a half years and that is very unusual for staff at gun clubs, we are very fortunate. 

David Muzzey was our first hire as Professor of Trapology - David was a great find and we thank Paul Devane for helping connect us to David. Ian Hurd started with us when we opened and has gone on to become a Master Class shooter, a Level 1 Coach and he is about to finish his College courses all based on his shooting scholarship. After David and Ian moved on, we started Dakota Rayburn and then Jared McQuiiniff as the experts managing all that goes on out on the courses.

Ed Couture was a mainstay of our operations in the winters in our early years and we were very proud to help send him to the World FITASC Championship where he captained his Veterans’ team to bring home the gold for the USA.  Jack Houghton has helped us on his visits to Florida and we thank him for all he has done with us. Skip Peck was the man who set all the nice targets for our NSCA shoots, the ones you did not like were mine. We were fortunate to have the Zephyrhills HS ROTC as our trappers for the registered shoots and we wish them all well in their future endeavors

Cathy especially wants to thank Pam Evanoff for all her help in the office and working with the registrations for events. If you remember the large white boards, where we set out the names of the shooters in their classes ? Well the creation of the boards and the entries each time were all Pam’s work. While we mention Pam, we must also thank Fred Evanoff for his able help in running events on the five stand at NSCA and special shoots – many thanks Fred.

After Pam moved on to work for her Church, we were very fortunate to have Mary Wieden join us to work in the office. She was invaluable when Cathy went down with pneumonia last year and was out for a couple of months, we were lucky to have Mary to rely on.

We were very proud to win the Four Star rating from the National Association of Shooting Ranges. It took an 11-page questionnaire and an inspection visit from Rick Patterson of NASR to win the award. We were the only exclusively sporting clays club in North America to achieve that standing and it reflects on you our shooters for all the support that you gave us over the years.

Just over 5100 people are receiving this email – you are all around the world, we have readers in China, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and many countries in Europe.  Clearly, there will not be a weekly update now that Deer Creek is closed, but I will still send out shooting tips to this list. I will start on an E-Book of all the past tips, when I recover from moving everything off the ground!

We estimate that

We have made about 25,000 cups of coffee,

Served about 20,000 donuts,

We have thrown in excess of 5.8 million clay targets,

Nearly 1,600 women and kids took part in our free clinics,

Almost 200 of them continue to shoot,

Golf carts were rented over 13,000 times,

We rented guns over 2300 times and

We sold over 1100 candy bars (not including those consumed by the staff)

Our largest number of shooters in a single event was 412, (Children’s Home Shoot 2006) and the largest single event by number of targets was 30,800 (Sheriff Bob White 2005)

Most importantly, we have not had a single shooting accident. When we were deciding ‘what type of gun club do we want’, we decided that safety was going to be our top priority even over clean bathrooms and good targets and a good customer service experience. We are very proud to have achieved our goals.

Over 41,000 people signed our safety rules and waiver sheet on their first visit, and less than two dozen have been asked to leave for not following the rules. Our best laugh over safety was the gentleman who said ’if I had known you were going to enforce the rules I would not have broken them”

Cathy has produced two books about charity shoots that she has sold to gun clubs and charities across the US, and she is working on turning these into E-Books to make them more accessible for fund raising organizations.

I am going back to coaching which is what I was doing before Deer Creek. I can be reached on 813-907-7340 or www.rogergascoigneshootingcoach.com

Anyone who has taken lessons from me at Deer Creek will keep the same rate for future lessons.

I continue to write monthly columns for the CPSA Magazine PULL! And you may see other presentations, articles and the like from us in the future, we already have a first presentation scheduled in April.

We have enjoyed our time at Deer Creek and we look forward to seeing some of you out on the range

Best wishes to you  all

Cathy and Roger