The Instructor Matters
In the world of competitive sports, the decision to hire an instructor (or coach, as the case may be) is an intensely personal one, particularly if you are, like myself, not especially athletically inclined or naturally gifted. In the case of those of us with average or less abilities, proper instructor choice is critical not only to achieve maximum realization of any potential we have but also to ensure the best hope of building and maintaining the confidence to stay with it.
When I first dipped my toe into the world of competitive shooting, I initially thought I’d try just “winging it” myself with only the most basic introduction to firearms class. After all, how hard could it be? Just aim and fire, right? WRONG! As I quickly discovered after merely a couple of matches, shooting accurately and with decent speed, especially while moving and/or with moving targets is much more intricate than television would leave us to believe. Vastly more complex than simply pulling the trigger, there is a great deal of precision, muscle and breath control involved as well as correct grip, stance and visual perception in order to put the rounds exactly where desired.
I initially started out with a semiautomatic pistol since it seemed that is what most competitors were using, especially the very few women in the sport. For almost a year, I attended matches nearly every week, placing at or disappointingly near the bottom of the scores every single time. I tried my best to improve, but remained unsuccessful. As I neared my frustration threshold and was just about to give up competitive shooting all together, a dear friend and fellow competitor urged me to give an instructor friend of his a try at teaching me before I gave up completely. Daren suggested I contact Dean Brevit for at least one lesson before quitting the shooting sports, to see if he might be able to put me on the path to success.
Since Daren had always been very encouraging to me, I took his advice and emailed Dean to set up a lesson following a match at his range. Although Dean seemed intimidating at first – he has an overwhelmingly impressive resume of real-world and competitive shooting and training experience – his manner was very calm, relaxed and matter-of-fact, and it didn’t take me long to settle down, figure out his dry British sense of humor, and focus on what he was telling me to do. Within that first hour, he corrected my grip on the gun, showed me a better way to reload with my small hands when the magazine ran dry, and gave me some options for transitioning from target to target in spite of my genetic visual challenges.
Over the ensuing months, I continued to take sporadic lessons from Dean, but was still having problems with the semiautomatic pistol, and just couldn’t seem to put the rounds where I wanted. I’ll be the first to admit that I am a very difficult student, with a tendency to be a perfectionist and a pessimist, and to get discouraged extremely easily. This also causes me to sometimes put unrealistic expectations on an instructor, although I have been fortunate in the past to have found truly remarkable teachers – Charlie Storm who successfully coached me for 24-hour endurance mountain bike racing, Shaums March who gave me the courage to race mountain bike downhill events and inspired me to reach for the stars, Moses Akor who worked wonders with my tennis game, and my beautiful and talented aunt Paula “Gypsy” Stump who shared with me her extensive knowledge of the art of Oriental Dance. Apparently now I had gotten lucky once again by being referred to Dean Brevit for shooting instruction, and it was at this point I realized just how important having an adaptable instructor truly is.
It was one year ago that Dean and I had a long discussion about the issues I was having with the semiautomatic – especially my difficulty with establishing good solid trigger control and the resulting tendency to “run on” and jerk the trigger which pulled the gun off target. Dean’s suggestion caught me completely by surprise. Rather than simply “using a bigger hammer”, he recommended a complete changeover by switching from a semiautomatic to a revolver. I honestly had never considered a revolver – an old-fashioned cowboy gun for competition??? But Dean was quite serious and said if I would be willing to commit to a year of trying revolver, he guaranteed he could correct the majority of the problems I was having with my current pistols.
I trusted him, and on his suggestion, purchased a Smith & Wesson 686, bringing it directly to him for some customizing work. That is when I learned how valuable having an instructor who is also a top-notch gunsmith can be. The gun I picked up out of the original box is a world apart from the gun Dean returned to me after his customization. He adjusted and fitted the grip completely to my hand size and finger strength, smoothed out the trigger beautifully, and even set it up with a large red dot fiber front sight with a solid black rear blade specifically chosen so that I could easily put the gun sights on target without needing the corrective lenses I had previously been using for shooting.
The next few months were a blur of working harder than ever to figure out this “new-old-fashioned” gun and the initially complicated method of ejecting spent rounds and reloading. I practiced daily and continued to take periodic lessons from Dean. Sometimes improvement came rapidly and other times I felt like a discouraged newbie all over again, but I persisted as per my promise. Within barely four months, my IDPA classification score had improved by nearly 50 seconds, moving me from Novice to Marksman (in fact, scarily close to Sharpshooter!…). Dean heard “I hate you and I hate this gun” dozens of times, as he had predicted, but now that the year has passed, I have to admit he was right in that learning the revolver has corrected many of my previous trigger control issues, but more than that, revolvers have become my gun of choice for all types of competitive handgun shooting – IDPA, Rimfire, and now the new Pocket Carry Competitions as well.
Thanks to Dean’s awareness of the challenges I was facing and the willingness on both our parts to be adaptable, I’ve found my niche. Every match I still face an uphill battle and am as yet still just a Marksman, but I’m enjoying the shooting sports more than ever now and feel comfortable and confident enough to keep working hard at learning and improving every time. The wheelgun feels completely natural to me, and the once-complicated reload process is second-nature thanks to Dean’s clear and concise instruction. Plus, I’ll be honest, there’s something kind of cool about being one of the very few women out there competing with a revolver… 
