Dear Technoid,

Out here in CA, we have only a few top notch courses plus anything that involves “guns” is looked at with a jaundiced eye. Not “politically correct,” you know. So we shooters keep a fairly low profile.

However, being somewhat of a contrarian and looking for an excuse to go shooting that my wife couldn’t argue with, I talked our company’s employees club into sponsoring a Turkey Shoot. I had 20 participants (including several ladies) out of a company of 500. The participants were mostly non-shooters, we shot 50 clays at the local sporting clays course and did a deli lunch. Everyone had a great time and would like to do some more. One guy’s wife was in the Pro Shop afterwards signing up for lessons. (So much for political correctness!)

My question is this…. I’d like to set up a class system for awarding prizes. Our scores were pretty evenly spread from 1 to 28 out of 50. My plan is to award class prizes plus one or two raffle prizes. Between early morning sips of coffee, could you provide me with some info on how the Travelers’ system works? Or tell me who to write to for more info?

Thanks,
Logan

Dear Logan,

Attaboy! For introducing your company to the joys of clay shooting and poking your finger in the eye of political correctness, you are hereby awarded the coveted Junior Technoid Order of the Palm (third class). Well done! Your personalized genuine plastic pocket protector will be arriving by Email any day now.

One of the most popular methods of awarding prizes at “fun” shoots is the Lewis Class system. Here’s how it works. Let’s say that you have 20 shooters and want to award 5 prizes. You wait until the shoot is over and collect everyone’s scores. You divide the five prizes you have into the 20 shooters and come up with a Lewis class number of “4”. You then simply give a prize to the person with the highest over all score and then a prize to every forth person after that counting down the list of scores.

Prizes would go to the #1, #5, #9, #13 and #17 placed shooters. Other than first overall, it is pretty much luck, but still has some vague relation to how well the person shot. It is easy to do and everyone has a pretty good shot at winning something. If scores are tied, solve it by coin flip, or if there is time, by some sort of little shoot off. Spectators love shoot-offs. Make sure to call each group of four shooters a “class”(class 1,2,3,4 and 5). It makes everyone feel better to say they “won their class”.

Also, I would suggest that your shoot committee spring for a couple of those throw-away cardboard cameras. Take pictures of everyone holding or shooting their gun and post the photos on the company bulletin board.

Wear your JTOP (3) with pride. You earned it.

Best regards,

Bruce Buck
Shotgun Report’s Technoid
(Often in error, never in doubt.)