A Testimonial from Youth Coach

Here’s a testimony to the effectiveness of the Knowledge Vault. It really works!

 

“My 15-year-old son is rocking and rolling!

He won A Class at Gamaliel and punched up to AA after our winter break. At Northeast Regionals, he picked up eight punches. So, I expect that he’s going to be in the Master Class shark tank before long. The recent Coaching Hour about punching up to Master Class is perfectly timed!

I’ll admit that I’m biased and new to this sport, but I think what makes this stand out is that the first NSCA event we ever shot was last year – the Gamaliel Cup in April 2017.

My son started shooting SCTP in the fall of 2015 using his grandfather’s Remington 1100. At the time, I told him he could have any gun he wanted, as long as he paid for it. He saved up his money and about a year later bought a Silver Pigeon I.

Recently I’ve been surprised at how many people have asked my son who his professional coach is. It’s interesting to watch their expressions when he tells them the only professional coaching he’s had is one lesson with Gil last year and using the Knowledge Vault!

Since I’m getting questions about the Knowledge Vault, I’ve been trying to figure out how to summarize what it is and what we’ve gotten out of it. We started using it over a year ago and here’s our approach what I’ve come up with:

• I’ve listened to every Coaching Hour from sometime in 2010 forward, then had my son listen to a subset of them. Usually, we listen to them as we’re driving. Now we’ve decided that just like you shouldn’t shoot the day before a competition, you shouldn’t listen to Coaching Hours the day before a competition (and for the same reasons that we’ve learned in the Coaching Hours).
• When we started listening to the Coaching Hours, my son had been shooting for about a year and a half and I had just begun shooting. Everywhere we went, people gave us a huge amount of advice. But not all advice is good advice. I don’t believe any of it was malicious; there was a lot of advice that we had to forget to get back on track.

  We hit the jackpot with the Coaching Hours – a wealth of solid advice that we could build on. It does a great job of covering all of the pieces needed for a solid foundation – mental, physical, technique, pre-competition, the competition, managing expectations (a big one for me), and many others.

 

I don’t know how many times I’ve made my son listen to the Coaching Hour where Gil talked about Vicki, himself, and one of their friends trying to make a living only shooting and ending up with about $500 a year to try to temper his ambition of making a career only shooting.

 

• The videos are tremendously helpful. My son had watched every one of Gil’s publicly available videos on YouTube numerous times and about any other video of sporting clays he could find. The Knowledge Vault videos are much more beneficial and numerous. You can get in five minutes of watching Knowledge Vault videos more than you can get watching two hours of sporting clays videos on YouTube.

 

• We haven’t delved as deeply into the discussion forum, but recently I’ve started digging into it. It’s another amazing wealth of knowledge.

  When I come up with some questions, the forum is now my first stop. Before, I would Google it; the problem with that is the same as taking advice from everyone at the club – there’s just as much well-intended bad advice as there is good advice.

 

• I’m now an assistant coach on TH’s SCTP team, and what I’ve learned has been tremendously helpful.

  My 17-year-old daughter traded in her ballet shoes for a shotgun in January. It has been amazing to see how quickly she’s progressed with me and her brother helping her. This month she shot a 76 in Sporting Clays SCTP regionals and 77 in skeet SCTP regionals (note that she hadn’t shot more than 100 rounds combined before January).

  I also see improvements in the team, as my son has the confidence to help his teammates. This is the same kid that wouldn’t speak loud enough for the trappers to hear him call for the bird when he first started.

  Of course, I like it when anyone brags on my kids, but I love it when they compliment my son on how kind and helpful he is to their kids – even kids on other teams.

 

Other observations:

 

1. During Coaching Hour, if you make noises while Gil is talking, he’s going to ask everyone to try to be quiet. If someone is making noise while Vicki is talking, Gil is going to get feisty, fast – don’t mess with his girl!
2. Setting goals. In the Coaching Hour, there has been a lot of discussion about goal setting. Gil has given the analogy of one’s progress in shooting to his personal journey in trying to get comfortable with public speaking.

   When my son took the lesson from Gil last year at Garland Mountain, it was cold outside and hot inside. I noticed Gil was leading the morning class time discussion in his thermals. I decided at that point, Gil clearly has reached a nirvana level of comfort with public speaking! So, my goal is to be as comfortable shooting as Gil is speaking in public! The only issue is, when I visualize my goal, I see Gil in his thermals!

 

Thank you for these amazing resources! I’m excited about where this thing will take us over the next ten years!

 

• S.H.”