I only joined yesterday and am not a big internet user especially forums but wanted to comment on this thread to add a real positive spin on it.
First up i do not know Ray at all and as far as I'm aware have never met him so have nothing to gain by the words i say here.
Secondly a bit of history....I began shooting around late 1994 as was initially a sporting shooter doing OK in my classes as i slowly improved till around 2000 / 2001 when somebody suggested i shoot some skeet to improve my sporting. No quite sure why skeet gets labelled as "the beginner discipline or "boring and easy" i have no idea as pretty much within weeks the game had captured my imagination more than any other discipline ever did. The quest for perfection in every shot and break 100 straight so i could enter a shoot off and maybe win a class had me enthralled right from the beginning.
In the start i used my skills I'd learnt on the sporting fields and did OK breaking some good scores to the point where in 2003 i decided to try and have a run at the England Skeet team. The first Selection shoot was at Southern Counties and i broke a 184 ex 200 over the weekend (late April). Now given at the time you needed roughly a maximum of 8/9 away over 400 targets to get into the team and i'd shot a 96 and an 88 - i was terrible and did not have a game that held up under pressure.
I left that shoot desolate and nearly walked away... but that has never been my nature so i did some research into skeet and came across a guy called "Todd Bender" and he happened to have a couple of VHS video's out - i bought them both and with the help of a coach (Dave Boylan) i was using at the time re-built my skeet game using these methods from notes i took off the video's taking them to the range at my local "one skeet range" club Sunday mornings shoot to work on my notes.
Four / five weeks later i returned to competitive shooting at Northampton for the English Open - ran 100 straight and ended up 5th overall. My next shoot two weeks after that was my county skeet championship at Barby sporting - ran another 100 straight and ended up second after a shoot off. By the end of 2003 i had shot 3 x 100 straights, 2 x 99's 4 x 98's and my lowest score was a 95.
In early 2004 i found out Todd was coming to the UK coaching for the first time. I had to have a session with him to see if i could make any further improvements. For those that don't know a typical day is around an 8:30am start and you are in a group of 4 shooters of similar ability and its INTENSIVE - i went through around 400 shells that day.
The result - even more tweaks to my game and yet more consistency and the results continued to flow..... by end of 2004 i had only shot two 95's and every other score was 96 and above and i broke a 394 ex 400 in the selection process that year just missing out on the England team in a 3 way shoot off which ran another 50 targets.I was also lucky enough to shoot the English Open Skeet on the same squad as Todd in that year - another great learning experience watching him approach the shoot target by target up close. I was his lead off guy - peg 1 and Bender on peg 2. (Note - he shot the 20 gauge and still won!)
Anyway to cut a long story short i continued to have coaching off Todd for the next couple of years along with e-mail exchanges on my progress and i did make the skeet team the following year (2005) and broke into the top twenty averages for both 2004 and 2005 (i think).So yes the DVD's will work to an extent and you can make the basic changes to your game from them, but they will not spot the slight eye shift issues or the slight foot fault issue on any given stand and make the needed adjustments.
I would 100% totally recommend a coaching clinic with Todd to improve your skeet game and i still to this day regard him as the coach i use and i am booked onto a clinic this coming March after a break from shooting to get married, buy a house etc.
Sure i realize some will not like the group format of coaching but my take is that if you didn't have others there to give you a break then you'd not last the full day. Plus it gives you time to step back an observe little things from the third person perspective. Also of course its a cost issue as a day is $1700 so dived by four is sensible but a single day on your own - ouch! Like i said earlier too i still shoot approx 400 shells on my clinics with Todd so plenty of gun time really.
I want to add a few things for those who still doubt if its worth it.....
Peter Wilson brilliantly said about his coaching with the Sheik - "he taught me to shoot like and Arab" - i think that fits perfectly with my thoughts that the Americans have been the kings of skeet (Certainly gun up) and looking at Kimberly Rhode and Vincent Hancock in the Olympic version of skeet i'd suggest they are dominating the gun down version these days quite a bit too - so maybe it is prudent to "learn to shoot skeet like an american"
The other one is we are talking about coaching off one of the top people in the sport. Just check out his career achievements page -
http://bendershima.com/?page_id=7 - crikey the guy has gone full years without missing in a gauge - 100% average over 1200 targets type stuff. If we were talking football and coaching - off say Steven Gerrard, or Golf and coaching off Tiger Woods, or cricket and coaching off Kevin Peterson - then that is the kind of level of individual sportsman we are talking about ability wise.
Costs are often mentioned in relation to these types of things - but given the level of instructor your talking about and the associated costs with the sport anyway then i actually think it offers better value than any other coach / plugging away on your own. For instance today $425 is approx £270 - now that doesn't go very far in terms of entries to shoots - 10 registered shoots - what you going to learn without guidance in 1000 competition targets - I'd wager not a fraction of what you'll get from a day like this.
So those neutrals reading this wondering "if its worth it" - if your serious about your skeet shooting and want to take this brilliant game of skeet to the very top - then this is a must grab the opportunity type thing - certainly from my experience.
Sorry for the ramble and unbounded enthusiasm but i couldn't think of a better way to put down what i wanted.
