What if the three seconds before you call pull matter more than what happens right after that target breaks, or doesn't?

The answer changes how you shoot, and it has nothing to do with your gun.

Tracy Kienitz sees this at every fitting at Passionate Outlaws: two shooters walk in with identical scores and walk out completely different by the fifth station. One misses a bird and carries it like a rock in her pocket. The other misses, resets, and moves on like it never happened. Same gun, same skill, same squad. Totally different day.

That's not talent. It's a pre-shot routine for trap shooting, and Tracy teaches it to every woman who sits down with her, right alongside the fit.

Your Last Miss Isn't the Problem. What You Do With It Is.

Most women learn to mount, swing, call, and fire. That's the whole lesson. The gap between one bird and the next, five seconds, maybe less, never gets a second thought.

So that gap fills itself in, usually with the wrong thing. A miss turns into frustration. Frustration lands in the shoulders and the jaw. That tension changes the mount on the very next shot, and one miss just became two.

Something that Tracy sees it constantly? A gun that fits perfectly, and the shooter still loses to her own head. "Mindset is not a soft topic," she says. "It's a skill set." Skills get taught. Skills get practiced. This one just never gets much attention.

What Tracy Is Actually Watching For

During a fitting, Tracy's doing two things at once, and most women only clock one of them.

She's watching the obvious stuff: mount, stance, hold point, timing. That's expected. It's why women drive hours to sit down with her in the first place.

What they don't expect is that she's watching them just as hard after a miss. Shoulder drop. Jaw clench. A rushed next mount. Or, in the shooters who've got it figured out, a reset before the next bird even leaves the house.

That reaction tells Tracy more than the miss ever will. Her own words: the gals who show up wanting to succeed, who actually care about their performance, see rapid improvement. The ones hunting for a magic stick don't.

The Reset, Station by Station

Here's what that reset looks like when Tracy teaches it, broken into three pieces you can use on your next round.

• Pick a spot and stick to it. Before you call pull, find one specific point on the house and look at the same spot every single time. That consistency starts working before the gun's even up.
• Let the tension go, on purpose. Most women carry a miss in their shoulders and jaw without ever noticing it. One breath. Shoulders down. Jaw loose. Do it on purpose or your body will do the opposite for you.
• Say something useful instead of something true. "I always miss the second bird" is a verdict. It doesn't fix a thing. "Front hand was a beat late, reset" is information. It's specific, it's fixable, and it gets you back to the next station instead of stuck on the last one.

Put those three together and you've got a shooter who trusts her mount instead of arguing with it, bird after bird.

Tracy didn't pull this out of a textbook. She built it watching shooters, season after season, station after station. Sport psychologists who train Olympic shooters have their own name for pieces of it, the QRST method, but the idea is the same one Tracy's been teaching on the trap line all along: quiet the noise, let the tension go, trust the mount.

What Changes When the Reset Actually Sticks

A gun that fits changes what your body has to fight through on every single shot. Length of pull, comb height, pitch, weight, Tracy runs through all of it. A Syren or a Lady Outlaw, the shotgun Kolar Arms builds to Tracy's own design with a length of pull as short as 12.9 inches, gives a woman's body a real head start most guns off the rack never will.

But the reset is what you do with that head start. Fit creates the opening. Your mental routine decides what happens next, shot after shot, all the way through a hundred-round day.

That's why Tracy coaches both in the same session. A fitting at Passionate Outlaws was never just measurements and a demo gun. It's mount, stance, timing, and the reset, all worked on together, because splitting them apart never made sense to her.

Related reading: Why Your Trap Scores Stalled (And It's Not Your Gun)

Quick Answers About the Pre-Shot Routine for Trap Shooting

What is a pre-shot routine in trap shooting?

A repeatable sequence you run before calling pull: a fixed visual point, a deliberate release of tension, and a specific, useful thought instead of a frustrated one. Same sequence every time, no matter what happened on the last bird.

How do I stop carrying a miss into the next shot?

Trade the judgment for information. "I always miss" fixes nothing. A specific, technical correction, said the same way every time, gives you something to actually act on and clears the miss out before your next mount.

Does Tracy coach mental game during a fitting, or just fit?

Both, same session. She's watching the mount, the stance, the hold point, and the timing, and she's watching how you respond to a miss in real time. Technique and mindset get coached together because they're pulling on each other on every shot.

What makes some shooters improve faster than others?

Willingness. The pattern holds at every fitting: the ones who show up wanting to do the work and treat a miss as information improve fast. The ones chasing a single fix, a new gun, a new gauge, tend to stay stuck right where they are.

Your Next Step Starts Before You Ever Call Pull

Back to the question from the top. Do those three seconds before you call pull matter more than what happens right after that target breaks, or doesn't?

They do. A gun that fits your body takes the physical fight off the table. A reset you actually trust takes the mental one off the table too. You need both, and Passionate Outlaws is built to hand a woman both in the same session.

Stay Relentless

Ready to feel the difference for yourself? Book a demo fitting and find out what happens when your gun and your reset are both finally working with you instead of against you.