Taking their shot at team building

GUNS BLAZING: Michele Marland at Addieville East Farm in Burrillville. The grounds host both team-building exercises and client meetings. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
GUNS BLAZING: Michele Marland at Addieville East Farm in Burrillville. The grounds host both team-building exercises and client meetings. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

A little like golf, but you get to “break things.”
That’s how Jack O’Brien, manager of Addieville East Farm in Burrillville, describes sporting clays, the increasingly popular target-shooting game and alternative to the traditional corporate golf outing.
“It’s fun to break things,” O’Brien said about the appeal of clays for business groups. “There’s a domino effect. One company does it and then they bring clients and then those clients bring clients.”
Founded in 1979, Addieville has become the premier shooting sports venue in Rhode Island and the only one with a full-time corporate-outing business.
At nearly 1,000 acres, Addieville features an expanse of open space that is difficult to replicate in densely settled southern New England.
And over the years, O’Brien has steadily added equipment, refined the setup and otherwise improved the shooting experience at Addieville.
“It is an evolutionary thing,” O’Brien said about building Addieville’s sporting-clay’s course. “We started out with manual machines and now we have [remote] machines at every station with 53 shot representations. It is evolving every day. I always have in the back of my mind to expand.”
First brought to this country in the 1980s, sporting clays is meant to simulate shooting live game and, unlike single-site trap or skeet shooting, involves a natural terrain course with up to 15 stations instead of one shooting site.
At each site shooters fire shotguns at clay discs hurled at varying speeds and trajectories from four different machines.
The “breaking” part is what happens to the clay discs when struck by shotgun pellets.
With their walks through nature punctuated by bursts of challenging activity, sporting clays and golf share key similarities as platforms for doing business.

In both cases executives and employees have a chance to get out of the office environment and into nature with plenty of time to get to know each other, build trust and discuss projects or potential deals.
O’Brien said Addieville’s corporate visitors are about equally interested in internal team building and external client-meeting.
“We have the team-building bit where they have a meeting here and then go out on the course. And then we have some people bring clients in,” O’Brien said. “For years and years people have been golfing, and they are looking for something different.”
Of course, as much or more than golf, employees bring vastly different levels of experience with guns to the clays course.
This makes instruction an essential piece of taking corporate groups shooting.
At the Ashaway Sportsman’s Club in Hopkinton, volunteer Dick Greene said he has gotten an increasing number of calls from business contacts interested in doing group shoots, but the club doesn’t have the capacity to handle very many of them.
“We don’t have the manpower available to do instruction,” Greene said. “We are a club of mostly volunteers and are not looking to turn into a business like Addieville.”
Greene said this year Ashaway had hosted two business groups, including one from New York that comes to Rhode Island every year with their time split between deep-sea fishing and a choice of either golf or shooting.
“I have gotten quite a few calls on it – it’s becoming more and more popular,” Greene said about corporate shooting.

Addieville has 10 employees, which allows it to handle group instruction, although O’Brien notes that the experience brings diminishing returns when groups begin to get too big.
“A company will bring in 20 or 30 people, maybe more, and obviously there are logistics involved,” O’Brien said. “If you have 300 people who haven’t shot before, they won’t have a great time.”
Addieville was founded as a game preserve by the late Geoff A. Gaebe and was one of the first places in the country to feature a sporting-clays course in the early 1980s.
In addition to the shooting facilities, which include a “five-stand” range, Addieville has two trout ponds, six upland bird-hunting areas and a shop with shooting supplies. It offers courses in shotgun use and fly-fishing.
The facilities have expanded organically over the past three decades with a major investment in 1999 replacing manual clay-throwing machines with automatic ones.
O’Brien, who took over management of the Addieville East Farm when Gaebe died in 2010, said nationally there are maybe 10 other facilities with the kind of shooting amenities available in Burrillville.
This year, O’Brien expects to do more than 50 corporate shooting events, an increase from about 30 annually in 2006. The club has approximately 300 sporting-clays members, 125 hunting members and 40 fly-fishing members.
Although shooting may have a reputation as something that only appeals to a certain demographic, O’Brien said he gets interest from all kinds of companies.
“Today I talked to a garage-door company, but we get every facet of the business world: lawyers, banks, construction equipment, doctors and pharmaceuticals,” O’Brien said. •

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