If you know me, you know I put 100 percent effort into everything – my family, my teaching, my shooting, and offshore fishing. It’s how I’m wired, and it has drawbacks as well as benefits. It’s not easy to stay at the top of our game while running a business and working with my wife to raise four children.

In that sense, I’m like a lot of you who aren’t professional shooters. I balance work, family, and other interests with my desire to compete and win. Lots of people have asked me how I do it, so I’m going to tell you. If you can’t get everything in order, there’s almost no way you will shoot to your potential. The key is prioritizing, organizing, and sticking with it.

From September to June, I work six or seven days a week. I’m up at five to make coffee and answer email, then at six I wake my kids, feed them breakfast, and head to our family’s range to teach for eight or 10 hours. I’ll have dinner with my family and then I’m back on the computer, working on the administrative side of my shooting school and our range.

My summer fills up with competitions – regionals, the World Sporting and World FITASC, and most years, the US Open. I also teach a few days a week and run fishing charters and competing in fishing tournaments with my father and brother. That takes up a bunch of time, and I also try to spend more time with my family while my children are out of school. I don’t “work” as much over the summer, but I’m still plenty busy.

I couldn’t do this without maintaining an extremely organized schedule. I’m writing this in August, and I already know what I’m doing every day between now and January 1. I even have scheduled time to practice before Nationals. My life is regimented and, at times, exhausting.
I’m not telling you this because I want or need sympathy! Rather, I’m trying to show that I understand how busy most people are and how difficult it is to find time to do it all, even those things you love to do.

You also must learn to shut out the other components of your life while competing, or else you won’t focus properly. When I step onto the course my sole priority is hitting every bird. When I am in the cage, the most important thing in the world to me is hitting that pair. If it’s not, I’m not going to shoot to my potential.

Before I start an important round, I call or text my wife to make sure everything is good at home. Then I turn my phone off. If she really needs me, she can call the club. If it’s not an emergency, it can wait.

That’s why it’s so important to take care of your family obligations. If I were traveling to a tournament and my wife was unhappy about it, I’d have no chance to perform to my potential. Fortunately my family supports me wholeheartedly, and when we travel together, we create memories I’ll always remember.

I try to eliminate any other distractions, too. During the last US Open, I got a text that there was something wrong on my website. The way my mind works, I couldn’t ignore that, so I sat at the computer and resolved the issue before taking my family to breakfast. That freed my mind and I was ready to shoot well later.

People sometimes ask why I’m skipping a particular tournament, and my reply is simple: I don’t feel like going. It might be a big tournament with a hefty purse involved, but I don’t care – if I don’t feel like going, I won’t.
At the same time, even when I’m giving it my all, there are moments when I don’t perform as well as I would like. When that happens, I sometimes think about the sacrifices I’ve made – time, effort, energy, and money, not to mention the time away from my family and other things I enjoy, and many times I’ve considered giving up.

Yet I’m still out there because I love to compete, and I love to win. I’ve been competing for 30 years, and I’ve fallen short more times than I care to count. Still, every time I stand atop the podium at a national or world-level event, I know that the work I do to keep my life in balance is worth it.

You might decide to prioritize other things in your life, and I’ll agree that in the big picture, shooting isn’t that important. But with organization and planning, you can arrange things so that when you’re competing you can give it 100 percent – and that’s what creates performances you’ll remember.