agreeing with Russ... I think

[SMBeyer]

First off I would like to say to Russ that I don't find his words offensive or hostile. I feel that Russ is pasionate about his coaching and has high expectations for his students. His students should have the same expectations for themselves as well otherwise whats the point of hiring a coach. I don't know Russ at all other than reading what he has posted here and this is the vibe I get from him.

From what I see a lot of people want to complain about not getting better and not really do anything about it. Some people want to read and read and read and think that will solve all their problems and not actually work on getting better. And work is the right word here, it takes lots of hard work and dedication to truly improve to the levels that Russ is talking about. Books are great sources of information but you cant interact with a book like you can with a coach.

My experience with my coach was invaluable to my shooting. I have been a shooter all my life but mostly shotgun in my younger years then after getting married and having twins shooting became a once or twice a year thing with my family. Two years ago the twins were getting older and didn't need as much of my time and I needed something to do for myself. I had a Beeman P1 air pistol with a red dot scope on it and started shooting it in my basement and did that for a couple of months. Then met some guys that turned me on to first bullseye pistol shooting which I had done a small amount of 20 years ago which then led to the international pistol shooting. I bought an LP-10 and shot a 60 shot match in my basement the second day I owned it and scored a 556. After about a month of occasional shooting was shooting in the low 560's and after a couple months 566 was my high and I stayed there for about 8 months. One thing led to another and I decided to hire Sil Lyra as my coach. I had no idea what to expect from a coach when I started because I had never had a coach. This coaching was all done over the internet with me sending him my comments after each session and then him sending back his response and it would go back and forth like that until whatever we were talking about was resolved. This back and forth "talking" via e-mail was the invaluable part that you don't get with a book. At first it was hard to break my bad habbits but he assured me that with hard work and doing things how he wanted me to do things it would get better.

And I did get better. At home in my range I was consistently shooting in the mid to upper 570's with a high of 581. Went to the nationals this year and shot a 564 the first day and a 569 the second day. Not quite what I was shooting at home with zero distractions but this was my first "real" match except for shooting a couple matches at our local range which is more like shooting with a bunch of friends than an actual match. The first day I had a mental break after shot 50 that really killed me and we were working on keeping focused for the entire match. But to make a long story longer I don't think there was any way I was going to improve the way I did without the coaching and the hard work, lots of hard work. For three months before the nationals I was getting up at 4am to do my training before getting the kids up and to school. Maybe Coach Sil and I just clicked but I feel I couldn't have done it without him and hope to get back with him soon.

I didn't write this to promote Sil Lyra, but if anybody wants to ask I would be more than willing to share more and gladly promote him. I wrote this because I think unless you have had real professional coaching that is designed specifically for you with the feedback from the coach after every training session about what you did and how you felt and what you were thinking you don't understand where Russ is coming from. I don't want to sound all knowing because I am far from it and I don't like posting scores because it seems like bragging I just wanted to show how coaching helped me but unless you have had professional coaching you don't know what you don't know.

With that being said I am headed down to my range for some training so let the tomato throwing begin! Scott

[v76]

I don't think anybody is objecting and/or rejecting the theory that learning, experimenting and practicing (fundamentals, yes.) with the help of a coach and a sport psychologist is a good thing. Russ made some GREAT posts on here, just gotta scratch the surface a little - but also read the multiple debate threads with basically the SAME discussions about coaching/TT/books/online/long distance learning (2005?06?07?).

My only beef is about the manner in which those propositions are made systemically by Russ. Most answers going back vaguely to "fundamentals", "coaching", "right knowledge", etc. Of course those are important and I'm sure everybody got the point (and especially the URL) a few hundred posts ago. I guess you could call it the "post value Vs. Spam ratio".

Maybe adding a sticky thread with coaches' web sites/email addresses would clean up some threads?