End of Trail’s Decline, SASS Advertising Failures & Cowboy Action Shooting’s Future

Estimated reading time: 4 min

Getting Recruited: How Cowboy Shooting Spreads

[00:23]

Tim from Newhall called in with a story that will sound familiar to most people who found their way into cowboy action shooting: a friend dragged them out. In his case it was a fellow the crew knew well, a shooter who lived the lifestyle from the ground up. Tim described him as looking like he walked straight out of the Wild West, and the crew’s summary was more precise still: if you couldn’t haul it with a mule or blow it up with black powder, he had no use for it. One day he told Tim he was coming out, and that was that.

Tim brought his son along. The club happened to be running a Boy Scout day, the boy got to shoot, and they spent the afternoon with black powder. He never forgot it. What kept Tim from going further was the same wall the previous caller had hit: cost. The crew’s position has not changed in thirty years. You can start cheap, but you will end up replacing everything. Buy once, cry once.

End of Trail in Its Heyday

[02:42]

Cowboy action shooting was born in Southern California, with Arizona earning a nod for its early contributions as well. By the early to mid-1990s, the SASS World Championship, End of Trail, was pulling 500 to 800 competitors a year and 10,000 spectators would show up just to watch. Parking was $10 a head, admission was $10 a head, and that alone was $100,000 before a single round of merchandise changed hands. The event felt like a county fair crossed with a Renaissance festival, Western edition. Hundreds of vendors filled the grounds selling hats, leather, period clothing, and everything a first-timer walking in off the street might need to get outfitted on the spot.

That last detail is the key. A competing cowboy shooter arrives with everything already packed. The spectator walking in for the first time is a customer who needs everything. When the crowds were there, the vendors came. When the vendors came, newcomers had a reason to open their wallets and go home with a piece of the culture. That ecosystem fed itself as long as the attendance held. This past weekend at EOT 2026 at the Ben Avery Shooting Facility in Phoenix, by the crew’s count, there were perhaps 15 to 20 vendors where there had once been hundreds.

Two Rules of Business SASS Broke

[03:12]

The crew’s diagnosis is blunt and framed as plain business principle. Rule one: never move your business. SASS has relocated End of Trail multiple times. Every time a business moves, a portion of its customers go to the old address, find nothing, and never follow up. They assume it closed and move on. Anyone who has run a storefront has watched this play out. The loyalty was to the location as much as to the event itself.

Rule two: never stop advertising. The reasoning cuts two ways. If you go quiet, people forget you exist. But there is a second effect that is worse: silence reads as distress. A business that stops advertising signals to the public that it may be struggling or shutting down, which accelerates the decline in attention. Advertising is not a vanity line item; it is an ROI calculation. The early End of Trail drew massive crowds precisely because word was actively spreading. Southern California’s population, disposable income, and mild weather made it the ideal market to build that kind of momentum, and the promotion fed the attendance that fed the vendor economy that made the whole thing self-sustaining.

This most recent End of Trail was, according to people working the event, one of the first years with essentially no outward promotional effort. The vendor count reflected it.

The Fix: Give Spectators a Stage to Shoot

[06:27]

End of Trail already had a quick draw demonstration bay this year. The crew’s proposal builds on that: set aside one dedicated stage, put an experienced shooter there to run it, and charge spectators $10 to shoot a stage. The infrastructure is already on the grounds. All it takes is a staffed bay and a price point low enough to be an impulse decision.

There is no more efficient recruitment tool for cowboy action shooting than letting someone actually pull the trigger. A person who walks off that stage with black powder smoke in their nose and a grin on their face is a future competitor. No brochure or social media post converts a prospect as reliably as one live stage. The crew’s point is that the sport will never find a larger concentration of interested newcomers in a single location than at its own World Championship, and right now that opportunity goes untouched. You are never going to get more people interested in one place at one time than you have standing right in front of you at End of Trail. Leaving that without a way to convert them is leaving the sport’s future on the table.