[April 5] NTSA Club Instructor Course

Sparks

From the NTSA website:

NTSA Club Instructor Course
Written by Mark Dennehy
Tuesday, 10 February 2009
Folks,
Following some technical difficulties, the first NTSA Club Instructors course is back on again. It will be held in Wilkinstown Community Hall on Sunday, March 15.
The instructors will be Geoff Cooney (ISSF Class C) and Matt Fox (ISSF Class C).
This is envisaged as being the route to getting trained coaches in every NTSA club, so we strongly urge volunteers to sign up.
This course is the first step towards the NTSA Club Coach Course, which will be run later this year, and graduation from this course will be a prerequisite for that course.
The aims of this course are to prepare instructors to effectively coach ISSF rifle and pistol shooting training at club level and to develop coaching skills – planning, organisation, demonstration, analysis, provision of feedback and evaluation skills – so that coaches can plan and deliver a safe and enjoyable training programme for Club Shooters.

The course will run for one day from 0900 to 1700 with breaks for coffee and lunch.
Fourteen places are available for this course.

Participants on the course must:

1. Be a member of the NTSA and a club/other body
2. Be approved by the NTSA through their club/other body
3. Be 18 years of age or over
4. Pay course fee of 50 euro
5. Submit written requirements 7 days before start of the course
6. Have passion to develop the sport
7. Be willing to develop own skills and knowledge

Course candidates will be required to submit certain documentation to the NTSA 7 days before the start of the course. This comprises four (three for pistol coaches) essays of 250 words (half an A4 page) or more, discussing what the participant feels are the important aspects of the following topics:

* Firearms safety
* For rifle instructors: standing position, prone position and kneeling position
* For pistol instructors: air pistol and 25m pistol

Course candidates should contact Mark Dennehy by email at training@targetshootingireland.org or by phone at 085 7747546 for further details.

This course has been deferred to April 5; applicants must have submitted their assignments by March 20.


(And again, posting or PMing here is fine by me as well)
Discussion thread here.

Sparks

Took place today; 22 participants; report to follow after I get a few hours kip...

bigred

Sparks wrote: »

Took place today; 22 participants; report to follow after I get a few hours kip...

great to see such a turnout in the end. I'm so annoyed I couldn't do it. Hopefully you'll run another one some time.

Sparks

Okay, the final report on this course will wait until after Matt and Geoff get a chance to review the feedback on the evaluation forms, but as an interim report, it went very well

We had minor difficulties with logistics and a degree of misunderstanding with some applicants who thought this course was about teaching fundamental technical details of shooting instead of fundamental technical details of instructing, however even there the course was well received. We had a total of 22 attendees on the day from 11 seperate clubs (DURC, WTSC, RRPC, UCDRC, Inniskeen Gun Club, Kildare Hunt Pony Club, Shillelagh Pony Club, Ward Pony Club, Warrington Pony Club and Wicklow Pony Club).

From my own observations, the course went really well - people engaged with it from the first few minutes until the end, and there seemed to be a great deal of interest in it from the participants. I didn't see any indication - even from those who had done similar level courses from other sports - of flagging interest or engagement during the day. There was group work, presentations and most of the afternoon was spent in preparing and giving short lessons in basic shooting principles.

The next run of the CI course will be held in Fermoy Co.Cork at a date not yet finalised (and which will be after Matt and Geoff get to do their analysis of the course's feedback and make any adjustments to it which they think necessary). Two applicants are confirmed for this course so far and some additional candidates are strong possibles, having expressed interest in the course just run but been prevented by factors outside their control.

The next step in the training plan for the NTSA is to develop and run the next level of course up from this which will be the Club Coaches course; this will take a few months but we hope to run the first of these courses later this year. The idea is that when that's done, we'll have Club Instructor courses running every 4-6 months or so, and a Club Coaches course every year, and that we would build up domestic coaching levels until we had at least one Club Coach in every NTSA-affiliated club in the country and at least a few Club Instructors per club who can support them (and those are the minimum levels, we'd like to have more than that). We also hope to send coaches off to ISSF coaching qualification courses to build up levels until we have at least one Class C Coach in every province and higher-level coaches running the national squad and Irish teams. All this is part of a design where shooters are fed up the chain from recreational to club squad to national squad to high performance international squad to the Irish Team, with coaching support at every step. (Yes, that'll take a while to implement. Volunteer to help!)
I'll write this up in more detail for an NTSA website article and cross-post it when I get some time.

target

Congratulations to Matt and Geoff and to all those involved. Getting an instructors course off the ground requires a serious commitment and it brings great rewards for all who participate.

Looking forward to seeing the full report.

Well done the NTSA