5-Stand Shooting

5-Stand takes the variety of Sporting Clays and compresses it into a single compact field. Five shooting cages stand side by side in a line, and a group of traps set around the field throws a range of presentations across, towards and away from them.

Because everything happens on one field, a full programme of varied targets can be shot without walking a course. That makes 5-Stand popular at clubs with limited ground and as an efficient training format for Sporting shooters.

Sporting Clays spreads its variety across the ground; 5-Stand keeps the ground fixed and rotates the shooter. The result is a discipline that keeps varied presentations while removing the walk, the changing terrain and the station-by-station preview that shape a Sporting round.

It also differs from Skeet and Trap, whose flight paths and angles are defined by rule. In 5-Stand the trap positions and target menu are chosen by the club, so the same field can be reset to shoot very differently from one competition to the next.

Compak Sporting, a discipline formalised by FITASC in 1991, uses a similar compact five-position concept under its own international rules, and shooters often move between the two formats.

Each cage is served by the same set of traps, but the angles change completely from one cage to the next because the shooter's position relative to the machines has moved. A target that crosses left to right from the first cage may become an incoming or quartering target from the last.

Targets are called from a menu card posted at each cage, which tells the shooter which trap will throw and in what order, including singles and pairs. Shooters take their sequence, then rotate to the next cage so that everybody shoots every position. Scoring is hit or lost, with the total of broken targets deciding the result.

Preparation is the defining skill. Since the card is known before shooting, the shooter can plan a hold point and break point for each target and decide where the eyes should be for the next call, rather than reacting blind as in Trap.

Efficient movement matters because presentations arrive from several directions in quick succession within one narrow cage. Foot position is set as a compromise that allows the whole sequence to be shot without fighting the body, and the gun is moved with the target rather than swung to a fixed aiming point.

On pairs, target order is a real decision: shooters usually take the target that disappears first or the one that must be broken in a narrow window, then transition with the eyes leading the gun. Timing discipline — waiting for the target to settle into its line instead of rushing the first sighting — separates consistent scores from streaky ones.

An event is defined by the number of targets announced in its programme. Squads shoot the menu at each cage and rotate until every shooter has covered all five positions, and the highest number of broken targets wins.

Because 5-Stand runs under the sporting associations, competitors are generally placed in classes so results are compared within ability groups, and category awards are common. Ties for significant places are decided by shoot-off according to the rules of the body sanctioning the event.

5-Stand emerged from Sporting Clays as clubs looked for a way to offer varied field-style targets on a small footprint and with less time per round. It is now a standard club format across the Sporting community.

In the United States it is administered within the National Sporting Clays Association (NSCA) alongside Sporting Clays. Internationally, FITASC governs the closely related Compak Sporting, which it formalised in 1991, and national bodies such as the Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) administer compact sporting formats in their own countries.