By Collin Fehr
(February 2, 2024)
This past hunting season marked a veritable “coming-of-age” for my oldest daughter. The legal age is ten years to hunt big game (i.e., deer, elk, etc.) during the general season in the state I live, and she hit that milestone just six weeks before the season started. Unsure how to prepare a child for the wide-ranging demands of pursuing big game, I reflected on my own hunting journey. Growing up as a multi-sport athlete, I never learned how to hunt, rather, I spent my time developing sports skills, working out, and competing. It wasn’t until I retired from a post-collegiate athletic career that the time demands of hunting became tenable in my schedule. Unfortunately, I lacked something that I had come to take for granted during my athletic career: coaching.
Aside from minimum state requirements for hunting education, coaching opportunities in hunting are extremely limited. Sure, large sums of money can secure an all-inclusive guided hunt, but the hired outfitters do most of the work. For many hunters, they learn the craft through their upbringing in family hunting traditions. Although this has proven sufficient for many hunters, the preponderance of legal and ethical hunting violations each year illustrates the potential for other educational approaches. Moreover, some hunters, like me, aren’t raised in a family with a hunting culture. Rather, these sportsmen engage in a lot of self-directed learning to help them get started. In my experience, this resulted in a lot of mistakes and enduring failure. It took me six years to harvest my first general season elk. At times, I felt discouraged and wholly incompetent. I really could have used a coach.
The trial-by-error approach certainly is a good teacher, but I can’t help but wonder how much of my more recent hunting success is due to things I learned from sport coaches. Appropriate techniques and tactics equally apply to hunting as they do to athletics. Interestingly, though, I lost sight of these principles in the early stages of my outdoor pursuits. Perhaps it was the consistent success I experienced as an athlete that led to my sense of entitlement, but I thought hunting would come easy for me. It was as if I had been a high-level athlete for so long that I had forgotten what it was like to be a novice. Once athletes achieve a certain level of proficiency, their reliance on coaching changes. For developing athletes, the need for good coaching is paramount. The same can be said for novice hunters.
Although my daughter was unable to harvest an animal this past hunting season, she made considerable progress in her development. Much like learning to swim, one of the first steps is overcoming any innate fear. Hiking in the dark is a standard practice for committed hunters and would make any young child feel uneasy. Encouraging words from coaches are essential in these moments. Furthermore, no good coach would go into a competition without a game plan, and hunting is no different. Of course, the tactical demands of sport are dynamic and sometimes game plans need to be altered. This is especially true in the field. But how do coaches know what adjustments to make in these situations? What do they base their decisions on and why do their athletes trust them? Simply put, experience.
The best coaches think through the types of situations they might face in competition, as if they have already happened (i.e., mental imagery). In truth, these mental simulations are likely an amalgamation of their past experiences, either direct or vicarious. Something that can only be developed over time along with good coaching they may have received. It is this experience that is so valuable to athletes and hunters, alike. Without it, the novice is left to wander through the trial-and-error process, only hoping to find success. I found it because of the values instilled in me by coaches, but wonder if I would have persisted otherwise. Hopefully, for my daughter’s sake, I can be the coach she needs to learn those same lessons.
