Hello All...
I live in a remote rural area with small towns where we have an 8 ball league that has some strong players and a larger number of intermediate/casual players, some of whom would like to improve. The nearest city that might have an instructor is 2 hours away and the one most likely to have one is 8 hours away. Due to the sparse population we have 7 teams in our league but there are untapped players so we are trying to grow the league.
One idea I came up with is conducting our own Pool School where we teach new or current players the fundamentals (with an early emphasis on mental fundamentals) and then move on to position play, pattern play, banking and so on up the skill ladder. After talking about it for a couple years I finally put on a class for 5 students (that lasted 3 hours!) based on an outline of what I considered elements of fundamentals (11 pages!). While this class resulted in one student successfully applying what she had learned and for the first time doing a table run against a stronger opponent it is obvious that I need to break it up into modules (crawl, walk, run) and have fewer students in a session and probably incorporate mentoring as well.
Back in the day, I learned to shoot by feel, intuition and relying on my subconscious. After experiencing a few of life's episodes I had to relearn how to play through more analytical means, which has included making video recordings of my playing and conscious adjustments. Fortunately I have been able to meld both approaches and am once again a strong player but there are obvious challenges in teaching what I know how to do to someone else. For example, there is no way that I could teach banking to students because I use automatic aiming and do not know any banking systems. Fortunately, another good player knows banking systems so he would get stuck with that module. There is a third strong player that is also willing to step in and teach/mentor, so we will divide it up accordingly.
My previous experiences in teaching have all been in the corporate world, all centered around highly technical material that had nothing to do with physical performance. While I am meticulous, detail minded and am told I have a knack for explaining complicated matters in a way that is easily understood by neophytes, I don't know how well that is going to translate in this arena. I obviously want to make sure that I/we don't guide them wrongly. I think I am well versed on the physical and mental aspects of pool from reading a number of books, (e.g. Championship Pool) watching countless tournaments/players and lessons on YouTube as well as competing in high pressure situations but I don't really have anyone to bounce it off of when it comes to teaching pool.
One thing the students said was that they had tried learning via YT but it made a big difference having someone show them in person how to do something and correct what they were doing wrong. One part that was eye opening for them was when I broke a rack and gave them a walk through of how to evaluate the layout, choose between solids/stripes, how to pick the pattern, identify the key ball and deal with problems. True, that might not be considered part of "fundamentals" but to me it is a fundamental part of play and gives them a picture of how to do better while they are working on their stroke.
I don't know if there is an open source/free set of course templates out there or not... I just wrote my own from scratch. Is there something I should be using?
Any advice from the Instructor community is more than welcome.
TIA
I live in a remote rural area with small towns where we have an 8 ball league that has some strong players and a larger number of intermediate/casual players, some of whom would like to improve. The nearest city that might have an instructor is 2 hours away and the one most likely to have one is 8 hours away. Due to the sparse population we have 7 teams in our league but there are untapped players so we are trying to grow the league.
One idea I came up with is conducting our own Pool School where we teach new or current players the fundamentals (with an early emphasis on mental fundamentals) and then move on to position play, pattern play, banking and so on up the skill ladder. After talking about it for a couple years I finally put on a class for 5 students (that lasted 3 hours!) based on an outline of what I considered elements of fundamentals (11 pages!). While this class resulted in one student successfully applying what she had learned and for the first time doing a table run against a stronger opponent it is obvious that I need to break it up into modules (crawl, walk, run) and have fewer students in a session and probably incorporate mentoring as well.
Back in the day, I learned to shoot by feel, intuition and relying on my subconscious. After experiencing a few of life's episodes I had to relearn how to play through more analytical means, which has included making video recordings of my playing and conscious adjustments. Fortunately I have been able to meld both approaches and am once again a strong player but there are obvious challenges in teaching what I know how to do to someone else. For example, there is no way that I could teach banking to students because I use automatic aiming and do not know any banking systems. Fortunately, another good player knows banking systems so he would get stuck with that module. There is a third strong player that is also willing to step in and teach/mentor, so we will divide it up accordingly.
My previous experiences in teaching have all been in the corporate world, all centered around highly technical material that had nothing to do with physical performance. While I am meticulous, detail minded and am told I have a knack for explaining complicated matters in a way that is easily understood by neophytes, I don't know how well that is going to translate in this arena. I obviously want to make sure that I/we don't guide them wrongly. I think I am well versed on the physical and mental aspects of pool from reading a number of books, (e.g. Championship Pool) watching countless tournaments/players and lessons on YouTube as well as competing in high pressure situations but I don't really have anyone to bounce it off of when it comes to teaching pool.
One thing the students said was that they had tried learning via YT but it made a big difference having someone show them in person how to do something and correct what they were doing wrong. One part that was eye opening for them was when I broke a rack and gave them a walk through of how to evaluate the layout, choose between solids/stripes, how to pick the pattern, identify the key ball and deal with problems. True, that might not be considered part of "fundamentals" but to me it is a fundamental part of play and gives them a picture of how to do better while they are working on their stroke.
I don't know if there is an open source/free set of course templates out there or not... I just wrote my own from scratch. Is there something I should be using?
Any advice from the Instructor community is more than welcome.
TIA
But for the first steps imo it could be really helpful for your own ability to teach some fundamentals right from beginning. 
