ClayCurves

What am I looking at?

Score Chaser posts the scores. ClayCurves lines every score up against everyone else's so you can see where yours sits: against your class, against the classes above and below, and against how hard the targets were that day. Nothing here is official. Your NSCA class is whatever the NSCA says it is.

Three ways people use it

The numbers, in plain words

% broken

Targets hit divided by targets thrown. 72 of 100 is 72%. Everything is in percent so a 100-bird and a 200-bird event compare.

Class median

The score of the middle shooter in a class at that event: half the class did better, half worse. ClayCurves uses medians, not averages, so one shooter having a nightmare doesn't drag the class down.

vs class (points)

Your % broken minus your class's median at the same event. +2.4 means you broke about 2.4 more targets per 100 than the typical shooter in your class, on the same targets, the same day. Positive is good. Over a season it's averaged across every event you shot.

Percentile

The share of shooters you beat. Class percentile 69 means you beat 69% of your class; field percentile 29 means you beat 29% of everyone, Masters included. Ties count as half.

Shooting like

The class whose median your average sits closest to. A B shooter "shooting like A" is posting A-class numbers; the NSCA hasn't moved them yet, or the punches haven't caught up.

Difficulty index

How hard the targets played, after accounting for who shot them. −8 means the field broke about 8 fewer targets per 100 than its own form says it should have; +5 means 5 more. Hard is −3.5 or worse, Very hard −8 or worse; Easy and Very easy are the same the other way. Two adjustments make it fair: every shooter is measured against their own class's norm, and then against their own track record, because the B shooters who travel to a Regional are better than the B shooters at a club shoot. A Master-heavy field doesn't make a shoot look easy, and a strong field doesn't make hard targets look soft. Zero is the typical event of that kind; side events (sub-gauge, pump, side-by-side) are graded against other side events, main events and prelims against other mains. (Under the hood: a shooter's ability and an event's difficulty are fitted together across every result in the data, the way a rating system does it.)

Field+ and Class+

On the Shooter of the Year board. Field+ is your average points above the field median at the events you shot. Class+ is the same against your own class. Field+ rewards beating strong fields; a C shooter will never top it, which is why the board defaults to your own class.

Form (Squads tab)

Each squadmate's last 12 months on ClayCurves: events, % broken, points vs the class they're entered in at this shoot, and the class they've been shooting like. Blue class chip: shooting better than the class they entered. Orange: worse. Dashed: no results in the data yet.

Concurrent

Lady, Junior, Veteran and the other age and gender categories, taken from Score Chaser's award lists.

Reading the charts

Score histogram

Each bar is how many shooters posted that score, colored by class. The dashed marker is you.

S-curve

Find your score along the bottom, go up to your class's line, read across: that's your percentile. Lines further right are stronger classes.

Where each group lands

One bar per class. The thick part is the middle half of the class. If your marker sits inside a higher class's thick bar, you shot like that class that day.

What's in the data, and what isn't

Every NSCA Nationals, US Open and Regional on Score Chaser since 2020, plus every registered or state shoot anywhere in the country with 100 or more shooters. Small club shoots are not in, so your shoot count here will be lower than your real one, and a shooter who only shoots small local shoots won't appear at all. Non-registered and charity shoots are excluded. Combo events are left out because they double-count.

Shooters are matched by name exactly as Score Chaser prints it. Two different people with the same name will be merged, and a name entered two ways will be split. If that's you, or you'd rather not be listed at all, email hello@claycurves.com and it's fixed at the next refresh.

Data refreshes twice a week; squads for upcoming shoots refresh daily. ClayCurves is independent and not affiliated with Score Chaser or the NSCA.

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