Most waterfowl hunters don't think much about needing a shooting coach. Unless duck and/or goose buffs shoot clay targets competitively or for recreation, pure waterfowlers don't realize that their shooting could profit with some instruction. However, I'm convinced that any of us could profit by spending time with a professional shooting coach.

Instructor Will Fennell explains a shotgunning basic to the author.

If true professionals like Albert Pujols, Dustin Pedroia and Tiger Woods have coaches, guys at the top of their respective games, how in the world can't those of us at much lower levels of skill profit from instruction? Obviously, all of us can.

Every baseball team has a batting coach and a pitching coach. Every football team has a defensive line coach, an offensive line coach, a linebacker coach, a quarterback coach and more. This is particularly true at the NFL level but also in college, sometimes even in high school. But don't forget the NFL players are the best in the world and they still profit from coaching.

Shooting instruction has been popular for a long time in England, for many decades, actually. Some feel this transpired because of driven shooting over there. Such shooting was/is very expensive, or, if a shooter was "invited" and didn't do well that person was not invited back. So, instruction became popular for both reasons; the expense involved as well as the possibility of not being invited back. Sporting clays became popular in England many years before the sport even came to our shores, so shotgunning instruction gained even more popularity across the water because of sporting clays.

It was a few years after sporting clays arrived in America that the need was seen for a lot more instruction here. That's because the Brits were beating the American shooters at the game, and beating them badly. So the National Sporting Clays Association (NSCA) began instructing and certifying instructors. Shortly thereafter the National Skeet Shooting Association (NSSA) began certifying skeet instructors. Both programs have become very successful. Both organizations now have Level I, Level II and Level III instructors. For the most part these certified instructors teach sporting clays or skeet, but the bottom line is they teach the basics of shotgunning.

Thus instructors from either discipline can help virtually any shotgunner increase their skills. How can they do that? Like any sport there are certain basics that have to be both learned and practiced. This is true of, say, a football lineman and how he takes up his position, how a baseball pitcher goes through his wind-up, how a golfer grips the golf club. But we all have to realize that even when we know shotgunning basics we still have to practice them, and we have to realize that it's easy to slip and not even know it.

I remember watching a Gary Player golf video, and one of his important comments was that he always told his golf pro friends, "Keep a watch on my grip." He knew that, as much as he knew about his club grip, it was still easy for him to grip the club incorrectly.