SS Guides: Training your Airsoft team

Training your Airsoft team can be a hard task, because not everyone will agree about the best way of doing things – so we’ve got some handy advice for you all! Every team will have people with varying degrees of experience, and differing ideas of how things should be done, so we thought we’d see if we were able to help with some useful advice on how best to train up a team. To do that we’ve got some advice from Sean Walsh, a former member of the Canadian Military Police, who is now team captain of the Newfoundland Airsoft Regiment and a tactical trainer and instructor. Sean’s advice is great for honing the skills of experienced airsofters or for getting people started from scratch, but it’s not the only way to do things, as he’d readily admit. There’s more than one way to go about training a team, but why not give this guide a go and see how you get on? Point 1: Who will do the training? Will one of your more mature or experienced players deliver the training? Does this player have any real world related experience, such as previous military or police training? Or will the team leader just take the responsibility themselves? Appointing a training officer does have its advantages, as long as they are up to the job, because this will take a lot of pressure off the team captain. Having one person delivering the training also means it will be consistent and as this person develops their training delivery style and becomes more confident, the training they bring to the team will get better and better. Point 2: What will you be training? Once someone is “in charge” of delivering training it’s time to think about what training needs to be delivered. If you have novice airsofters in your team then obviously you’ll have to cover the basics first before moving on to more advanced stuff. In contrast, if you have an experienced team where everyone knows what they’re doing in terms of fire and manoeuvre etc, then you can focus on team work and efficiency training. Whatever you need to cover in training, it will pay to think about the sort of environments you’ll be skirmishing in, and tailoring your training towards that. If your skirmishes will all be in woodland then the benefit of training in indoor arenas will be lessened, and likewise if you train in swamps and open fields for skirmishes in urban environments. By identifying what environments you need to train for you can then prioritise training for certain skills. For example, if you will be competing in an outdoor woods type game, you might find stealthy movement, stalking, communications and marksmanship are some of the most valuable skills to your team. This is also a useful exercise when it comes to deciding what airsoft guns to use in skirmishes. For example, you’re unlikely to need airsoft sniper rifles in close quarters arena combat. Point 3: What training drills can you use? You can find drills to utilise a number of ways. You can research them using the web and industry magazines, though you should be wary of which sources you use. While many online resources are put together by skilled and experienced skirmishers, you could also easily come across something put together by a 15-year-old who’s based their training on Call of Duty. You may also have someone in your team who is experienced and knows of several drills, which is obviously hugely useful. Similarly to this, you can also copy what other successful teams do, or even seek advice from them at skirmishes you attend. Another option is to simply make up your own methods based on what you think your team needs to be better at. If you know you need to find a better way of communicating silently and make up your own methods, that’s fine as long as everyone in the team uses the same methods. In fact, if anything you invent works, then the chances are it won’t be that different to the recognized ways someone else is already teaching. You may even stumble across a totally new way of solving a tactical problem. Who knows? Hopefully that advice is helpful. If you want more advice make sure to keep checking back for more blogs with news, guides, tips and tricks for airsofting in future. We’ll address the problem of what drills to use in a future blog with more advice from Sean, so check back for that!