USA CLAY TARGET LEAGUE TRANSFORMS COACH AND ATHLETE EDUCATION

Competitive clay target shooting has been one of the fastest-growing activities in the United States, but with this growth comes a demand for new coaches who can keep up with a young generation of athletes while prioritizing the safety of everyone involved in sport shooting. 

USA Clay Target League identified an opportunity to do just that by moving from an inconsistent, presentational, and topical curriculum to a more captivating program that engages a modern audience and builds confident coaches and student athletes from the ground up. 

The values that USA Clay embraces and embodies are safety, fun, and marksmanship in that order, and these values are demonstrated throughout the program in a way that creates vigilance across the organization—without sacrificing enjoyment. 

Given the use of firearms, the importance of safety and creating a zero-incident culture is paramount. AllenComm partnered with USA Clay to determine which topics and lessons would strategically build safety borne of confidence from a base level and beyond. 

From their first interaction, coaches and athletes develop leadership and competence by completing interactive activities that review information and foundational principles. They also play an active role in storytelling that evolves the experience from presentational to behavioral by taking on a named persona who has to make an important decision. 

This sequenced story-based journey prompts learners to engage with the lesson, explore critical information, and apply concepts in real-world scenarios to contextualize outcomes. Paired with meaningful statistics along the way, both coaches and athletes are able to visualize the relevance of the content to their own roles. 

The final program is 216 minutes of web-based training with approximately 36 micromodules, with a scalable infrastructure that can easily be updated as needed over time—without another wholesale rebuild.  

Although the program is still in the early stages of rollout, we anticipate the following results: 

• Coaches and athletes can better recognize and proactively prevent safety incidents. 
• Safety incidents will decrease overall among all participants. 
• Participants are better prepared to react to a safety incident if one occurs. 
• Coaches can more effectively lead and engage new student athletes, which builds confidence and also continues to drive expansion, stability, and dynamism in competitive clay target shooting. 
• Student athletes are more interested in and prepared to participate in shooting events. 

Do you want to learn more about the development course created for USA Clay Target League? Download the full case study here.