A comment from the parent of a shooter we are working with:
“One benefit of your coaching that I really admire and appreciate as a parent is that so much of it applies to life in general – not just shooting!”
Some people think shooting lessons are about breaking targets. But in our experience, they should be about so much more, especially when it comes to learning to perform.
We have the privilege of shooting with young shooters as they enter college and go through it. In talking to their volunteer coaches, we see many of them emphasize breaking targets. The problem we see with youth shooting programs is the lack of emphasis placed on practice on and off the range, and the lack of discipline to help the athletes create goals and work toward them on a daily basis.
You get out of this game what you put into it, and that is where the discussion should begin.
Exactly what do you want to get out of this game that costs a lot of money and takes up a lot of time? Before even thinking about answering that question, you need to understand that if you are not doing this for yourself, then you are doing it for the wrong reason. If you have not decided for yourself what you want out of it then you will never achieve much from shooting.
If your young athlete could learn from youth shooting sports how to be honest with themselves, how to learn from failure, how to be more disciplined with their time, would the time and money spent be worth it? Well, it all starts with explaining the concept mentioned above: you get out of it what you put into it.
You can help by asking them just exactly what they want to get out of youth shooting sports. An easy way to get the ball rolling is to ask them if they see themselves shooting for the rest of their lives. If they see themselves shooting clays for the rest of their lives, then the chances of them making a goal to train on the course and off go way up, because they are creating a lifetime sport that they can get passionate about.
You can’t teach passion; you can only nurture it. And if they develop a passion for shooting clays early on in life, the chances of them learning the above character traits mentioned in the above paragraph really go up.
Only in dreams and fiction books and movies do people go from winning a tournament at their local club to winning the U. S. Open. It just doesn’t work that way. The other real conundrum is the better you get, the more time you must put in to get better, and the smaller the steps up the ladder become the better you are.
Young shooters are easily excited with the rapid learning and skill-building they experience, but they will soon hit the proverbial wall where it takes more effort to move to higher and higher score plateaus. This is described in detail in several different sports in Daniel Coyle’s book “The Talent Code,” where he talks about the protein myelin that wraps neurological circuits. Through repetition, it heavily insulates these circuits, which turns them into lightning-fast skill circuits in our brains.
It seems that the myelin growth is really rapid during young adolescent years – say between 15 to 20 years old. In studying this evolution, we need to understand that myelin is a living protein and wraps neural circuits every time the same circuit is fired. And when it is fired often enough, what started as an overthought attempt at doing something turns into something that can be done at higher and higher levels with no thought.
The myelination of the circuits in the brain is where skill is developed, and skill cannot be transferred from one to another; it must be built through repetition, failure, and correction. And there are no shortcuts.
If you can get your athlete to understand the one skill-building principle that you must fail to learn, they are on their way to becoming who they can be – not only in shooting but in life itself.
