Tag Archive for 'Lunghezza'

Enjoy to start again with young in clay shooting

Today I started a new professional story with Francesco D’Aniello. We met in 2000 or maybe a year or two before. He was a shooter of the Fiamme Oro at the beginning of a successful sporting career that then he had with the peaks obtained by winning 2 world championships and the silver medal in Beijing in shooting. We worked together for many years, every week on the shooting range in Lunghezza, Rome. I didn’t take part in the competitions abroad because I didn’t work for the federation but we met anyway, I took part in the competitions with athletes from other countries and so we had the opportunity to confront each other on the range.

Becoming a champion has never been easy and requires not only time and intelligent practice but also an intense mental investment supported by an equally intense mental preparation. For many years we met, together with his coach Pierluigi Pescosolido, another historical collaboration in my career, practically every week, including the cold months from December to February, when most shooters dedicated little time to training. With Pescosolido we organized training sessions always based on the quality of the technical action and never on quantity. The philosophy was: better to shoot less but well, always training both technique and concentration. When I say that we saw each other often, I mean that we spent at least 50 days a year together and continuously for at least 10 years. I mention this because today many young people even in shooting think that just a few meetings or a few months are enough to reach an optimal level of performance. There is nothing more untrue while the superficiality of this reasoning is demonstrated.

The novelty is that today Francesco D’Aniello manages the Lunghezza range and I have started to work with his group of young shooters. So the story starts all over again, educating and mentally training young people to learn to train mentally, in a sport like trap shooting in which stay focused is decisive for excellent performance. For me it is a positive stimulus, because it is a matter of starting again from the basic elements of mental skills, giving these young people time to learn and to confront their fears in competition and discover who will be more toughness and desire to continue in this path that is very demanding and does not guarantee results.

With Francesco we will try to transmit above all the passion for improvement regardless of the race results, the value of intelligent commitment for itself and not for what they can achieve.