We’re kicking off the 2016 Training Year in Texas this week with a couple of Defensive Shooting Courses hosted by Fundamental Defense. For many people in the firearms community, the new year starts at SHOT Show in Las Vegas, which I’ll be attending in a couple of weeks, but we usually manage to get a couple of classes in before that event and this year is no different. Here are some things to look forward to for the rest of 2016:
PDN Training Tour
Following the trend of the last few years, I am putting a higher and higher percentage of my range time in the spring and early summer this year, as part of the increasing importance of the Personal Defense Network Training Tour. The PDN Tour runs from March through July and will count for about 70% of my in person classes this year. As usual, I’ll start in Florida at I.C.E.’s Home Range, Ancient City Shooting Range and finish up the tour in late July in the Pacific Northwest. Along the way, I’ll make about 30 stops. In addition to my courses, we’ll have 10 other instructors offering courses around the United States. All Instructors are PDN Contributors and all Tour Courses are traveling courses that the instructors offer somewhere other than where their businesses are based. A major component of the PDN Tour is bringing World Class training to a location Near You. Establishing new training venues and building new training communities is an important mission for us. If you are interested in hosting a course for any PDN Contributor, send an email to Info@icetraining.us… we are putting the final touches on the 2016 Tour this month. Look for announcements soon about our participating instructors, courses and sponsors. And, of course, we’ll have a new look for the PDN Tour Truck in March!
Instructor Development
Over the past decade, Instructor Development has become a consistently larger part of the work we do at I.C.E. Training Company. In addition to our flagship Combat Focus® Shooting program, we offer Instructor Development opportunities for new instructors (Defensive Firearms Coach program), FitShot Coaching, our School Attacker Response Course (SARC) and advanced training topics including our Reality Based Training Instructor Course. As the company has grown and our work in these areas has increased, we’ve had some outstanding teachers take over a couple of these areas. Currently, Jamie Onion is leading our DFC Program and Barrett Kendrick is the head of the RBTIC. Both have extensive experience in these specific areas and are passionate about helping others understand how to teach and develop outstanding programs for their students. There are now have 4 of us teaching the CFSID Course; Omari Broussard, Alessandro Padovani, Jeff Mullenmeister (concentrating on LE Instructors) and I. I will personally be teaching that program in FL (Date TBD), CO (Oct), LA (in Feb) and WA (In July) this year. If you are interested in teaching defensive firearms skills or already teaching them and interested in developing your programs to a higher level, take a look at what we have to offer. All of our programs are demanding and have legitimate certification requirements, they are not “pay to play” and they focus on teaching not performing skills. When if comes to Instructors, we care about how well you can improve others, not how good you are yourself at end-user skills.
Distance Education
One area that I have become more and more interested in over the past few years is Distance Education. Truth be told, even since I first wrote an article or book or the the first time I stepped in front of a video camera, I was participating in a form of Distance Education. I passionately believe in taking advantage of the opportunity to reach more people with a legitimate education in personal defense and training concepts & techniques through means other than having them attend a class. In person classes offer a lot that distance education can’t in many ways, especially when it comes to physical skill development, but we can do a lot to educate through a combination of video and text, especially when backed up with online testing for successful completion of a course. We started formally offering distance courses with my Counter Ambush Home Study Course a few years ago. Look for a significant increase in distance education from I.C.E. Training Company and I in the very near future.
2016 is going to be a great year, I hope you get to take advantage of some of what I.C.E. Training Company and I will be offering! -RJP