Two Deer in Ten Seconds: What Teaching a Kid to Deer Hunt Actually Takes
Two 11 year old cousins took their first deer about ten seconds apart, out of the same blind, with the same rifle. The part that made it possible did not happen in that blind. It happened months earlier, on a steel target, with their hearts pounding from a sprint.
Quick Answer: Teaching a kid to deer hunt is not a range problem. It is a decision problem. Build the shooting fundamentals first with a simple checklist, then deliberately break the calm by adding running, excitement and a timer before the shot, so the kid has already felt an elevated heart rate behind a trigger long before a deer walks out. The shots a young hunter passes on matter more than the one they take.
Who this is for: Parents, uncles, grandparents and mentors preparing a young hunter for a first deer season, anywhere in the country.
I am going to walk through exactly how I trained two 11 year old boys this fall, in the order I did it, so you can run the same progression with your own kid.
Redleg Company is a precision rifle gunsmith and custom builder in Chandler, MN. Not a gun store. Build slots are running 8 to 10 weeks out, so if you want a rifle that actually fits a kid before next season, that conversation starts in the winter, not in August.
Ten Seconds in an Elevated Blind
We were in an elevated blind over a travel route during Minnesota's statewide youth deer season, October 15 through 18. Shots from that blind were going to be 50 yards or less. My son John was on the gun. His cousin Hans, also 11, was beside him. Hans's younger brother, who is 9, was along for the experience.
A doe and a small buck came through. John took the doe with a shot behind the front leg.
The buck did not leave.
I told John to hand the rifle to Hans. He was lining up for another shot himself, but he passed it over without arguing. Hans had to get himself back under control first, because he had just watched his cousin shoot a deer four feet away from him. Call it ten seconds. I did not have a stopwatch on it. Then Hans made his shot on the buck.
Two boys, two first deer, one rifle, about ten seconds apart.
I am proud of both shots. But the shot is the last two percent of this. Everything that made those ten seconds possible happened before the season.
What Most Dads Get Wrong About Teaching a Kid to Deer Hunt
Here is the mistake I see constantly, and I made versions of it myself before I knew better.
A dad takes his kid to the range. They sit at a bench, on a calm afternoon, with a sandbag under the forend and no clock running. The kid shoots a decent group on paper. Dad decides the kid is ready.
Then a deer steps out, the kid's heart rate doubles, his hands shake, the crosshair will not sit still, and none of that calm bench practice tells him what to do about it. He either rushes a shot he should not take, or he freezes and does nothing, and both of those feel like failure to a ten year old.
The bench proves a kid can operate a rifle. It does not prove a kid can make a decision while his body is dumping adrenaline. Those are two different skills, and only one of them gets tested in the deer stand.
So I trained for the second one on purpose.
PSST: The Four Step Checklist I Taught Before Any Live Round
Kids do not need a lecture. They need something short enough to run in their head when they are excited. I used PSST.
P is for Position. Comfortable and stable, stock seated properly in the shoulder. If the position is not repeatable, nothing after it matters.
S is for Scope. Proper sight picture, and knowing where the vital zone actually is on the animal. Not somewhere on the deer. The spot.
S is for Safety. This is the big one, and it is deliberately the step right before the trigger. Evaluate the target, the surroundings, and what is beyond it. Only then does the safety come off. The safety is not something you flick when you sit down. It is the last decision before the shot, and it is the step where a kid learns to stop.
T is for Trigger. Controlled and steady. No slapping it because the deer might leave.
Say it out loud with them every single time, at the range, in the yard, dry firing in the living room. The goal is that when a deer walks out and the kid's pulse is in his ears, PSST is the thing his brain reaches for instead of panic.
That is exactly what happened in the blind. More on that below.
Still deciding what platform to put a kid behind? Full breakdown on AR-15 vs AR-10 vs bolt action for deer hunting:
The Training Progression for Teaching Kids to Deer Hunt
This is the order I ran it. Each stage exists to fix one specific problem, and you do not move up until the stage below it is boring.
Stage | Setup | What it is actually teaching |
1. Dry fire | Tripod, no ammunition, indoors or in the yard | Controls, safety, position, trigger press with zero consequence |
2. First live fire | 25 and 50 yards, subsonic ammunition | Recoil and report without flinch, confidence that hits are normal |
3. Reactive targets | Steel and cans at the same close distances | Keeps a kid engaged when paper stops being fun |
4. Stress drills | Sprint or physical exertion, then shoot | Shooting with an elevated heart rate, which is the whole point |
5. Hunting ammunition | Deer vital sized steel target | Real recoil, real point of impact, aiming at a vital zone instead of a dot |
6. Distance and dope | Varied distances, rangefinder, DOPE card taped inside the scope cap | Ranging, holds, bullet drop, out to roughly 250 yards |
A few notes on why each one is there.
Dry fire is not a warm up, it is the foundation. A tripod removes the wobble argument so the kid can focus on the trigger. Most of the bad habits you will spend a season fixing get installed in the first hundred rounds, so spend time here before you burn any.
Subsonic ammunition up front buys you a flinch free kid. Soft report, soft recoil, hits on steel. A kid who is not afraid of the rifle learns four times faster than one who is.
Paper targets lost John almost immediately. He was bored. I switched to steel and cans and the whole session changed, because now every shot gave him a sound and a reaction. That is not a compromise, that is good coaching. A bored kid is not learning.
The stress drills are the part almost nobody does. We ran, and then he got behind the rifle while he was still breathing hard. It is the only drill on this list that trains the thing that actually causes missed shots on game, and it is the one I get asked about most, so it gets its own section below.
Then we moved to hunting ammunition and a deer vital sized steel target. Not a bullseye. A vital zone. I want the kid aiming at the thing he will actually aim at.
By the end we were working out to roughly 250 yards with a rangefinder and a DOPE card taped inside the scope cap, and he could connect after exertion. We were never going to take a 250 yard shot at a deer with him this season. The point of training past your intended distance is that your intended distance starts to feel easy.
How to Run the Stress Drill
There is no universal standard here, and anybody who gives you one is selling something. Getting a 10 year old's heart racing takes something very different than getting a 15 year old's heart racing. You are not hitting a number. You are getting that particular kid breathing hard, and you know your kid.
Here is how we ran it.
The rifle stays in the tripod the entire time, pointed safely downrange. Nobody runs with a firearm. The rifle never leaves the tripod and never comes off a safe direction. This is the part that makes the whole drill work, and it is not negotiable.
Send the kid to run. We ran around the house. A hundred yards, two hundred yards, whatever it takes. The distance is not the point, the heart rate is.
While they are running, move the gun. This is the piece most people would skip, and it is what turns a cardio drill into a hunting drill. I would adjust the rifle off target and change the scope. Now they cannot just drop back into a position that was already set for them.
They have to get behind the gun and find the target themselves. Out of breath, hands unsteady, they have to get into position, find the target through the scope, and make the scope adjustment.
They say PSST out loud to me before anything else happens. Position, Scope, Safety, Trigger, spoken while they are still gasping. If they cannot get through it, they are not shooting. That is the whole test. Can this kid still run the checklist when their body does not want to.
Then they shoot.
The part that made it stick was the clock. Time the whole evolution and let them try to beat their own time, safely. Kids will grind at that all afternoon. They are not aware that what they are actually practicing is staying organized while their heart pounds, because to them it is a game they are trying to win.
One rule on the clock. The time covers the run and getting set up. It never covers the trigger press. Any safety miss, any skipped step of PSST, and the run does not count no matter how fast it was. Fast and sloppy has to be worth nothing, or you have built exactly the wrong habit.
The Rifle, and Why I Set It Up That Way
Rifles became legal for deer in the county we hunted, which opened up options we did not have before.
Full breakdown on the Minnesota rifle law change:
I built John an AR platform rifle in .300 Blackout, with a 1 to 6 power scope and a suppressor. I am not going to turn this into a build article, but the reasoning behind those three choices is the part worth stealing.
How the .300 Blackout stacks up against the round people usually compare it to:
The cartridge lets a kid shoot subsonic ammunition early with almost no recoil, then step up to hunting loads on the same rifle without relearning anything. One rifle, one manual of arms, two very different difficulty levels.
The 1 to 6 power scope means he can run it at low power for a close shot in a blind and still dial up for a steel target at distance. A kid struggling to find a deer in a narrow field of view is a kid who gets frustrated.
The suppressor cuts the report enough that the rifle stops being intimidating, and it made training sessions dramatically more productive. To be clear, we still wore hearing protection. A suppressor reduces the noise, it does not eliminate the need for ears, and I do not want any parent reading this and skipping that.
The fit is the part people skip. A rifle that is too long for a kid is the most common thing I see handed to a young hunter, usually because it is dad's rifle or a hand me down that nobody shortened. A stock that is too long forces the kid to crawl the scope, stretch for the trigger, and drop their head onto the comb at a bad angle, and every one of those shows up as a flinch or a miss that gets blamed on the kid. Two quick checks. Put the butt in the crook of their bent elbow and see whether their trigger finger reaches the trigger comfortably. Then have them mount the rifle and look for about a fist of space between their nose and their thumb or the charging handle. If they are jammed up against it, the stock is too long. An adjustable stock solves this on an AR platform, and a traditional stock can be cut down and later restored as they grow.
I am Brandon Lolkus, and I own Redleg Company in Chandler, Minnesota. I am a precision rifle gunsmith and custom builder, a Type 7 FFL and Class 2 SOT, a retired combat veteran of the Army National Guard, and I hold a gunsmithing and machining degree from Pine Technical College with training under Gordy Gritters at the Extreme Accuracy Institute. I chamber barrels to under .0005 inch runout for a living. But none of that is what made this hunt work. What made it work was running sprints with an 11 year old and then making him shoot steel.
What the Law Actually Requires Before You Take a Kid Out
Training is one thing. Eligibility is another, and it is worth checking before you build a season around it.
In Minnesota, the statewide youth deer season is open to hunters aged 10 through 17. Youth aged 10 to 13 have to be accompanied by an adult parent, guardian or mentor who is 18 or older, and that adult does not need a license. Youth aged 10, 11 and 12 get a free firearm deer license. From age 12 up, the kid needs either a firearms safety certificate or an apprentice hunter validation.
Three details that catch people out. The accompanying adult generally cannot hunt during this season. Party hunting is not allowed, which means the youth has to tag their own deer, so there is no quietly putting your tag on it. And the blaze orange requirement applies to adult mentors, not just to the young hunter.
If your kid needs the firearms safety certificate, do not leave it until summer. Classes fill, and most of them run through local instructors and school districts on their own schedule. The DNR lists courses and sign-up here.
Minnesota firearms safety certification for youth:
Source for the season rules above: Minnesota DNR youth deer season. Check it yourself before the season rather than taking my word for it, because rules change.
If you are reading this from outside Minnesota, none of the above applies to you. Minimum ages, certification requirements, supervision rules and mentored hunt programs vary a lot between states. Look up your own state wildlife agency before you plan anything. The training in this article travels anywhere. The paperwork does not.
What Happens If You Skip the Preparation
People do skip it. Every season, kids get handed a rifle and put in a stand with a few rounds of bench practice behind them, and here is what that actually costs.
The kid rushes a bad shot. An untrained young hunter with a racing heart and no checklist takes the shot that is available instead of the shot that is right. That is how you get a gut shot deer, a long tracking job in the dark, and an animal that suffers. This is the real cost, and it lands on the deer, not on the hunter.
Or the kid freezes and does nothing. Less talked about, and in some ways worse for the kid. They see the deer, their body floods, nothing their dad told them is reachable, and the deer walks away. They go home feeling like they failed at something they were supposed to be naturally good at.
Either way, you can lose them. A kid whose first real encounter with hunting is humiliation or a bad kill often does not come back. That is the actual stake here. Not a tag. Whether this kid is still hunting at 30, and whether they will be the careful kind of hunter when they are.
And the habits you install first are the ones that stick. A flinch built in the first hundred rounds takes years to undo. I see adults still carrying flinches they picked up as 12 year olds shooting a rifle that was too much gun for them. Front load the work and you never have to fix it.
Four Days With Three Boys
Shooting is the easy part to teach. Hunting is the hard part, and most of it is boredom management.
We ran morning and evening sits of about two to three hours. Keeping three energetic boys quiet and still for that long is, I will say this diplomatically, a skill I am still developing. Nine, eleven and eleven. In a box. For three hours.
Between sits I taught them the part nobody teaches kids. We pulled up onX and looked at aerial maps together. Which way is the wind. Why does that mean the blind goes there and not here. Where are the deer actually traveling and why. They were making those calls with me by the end instead of just being delivered to a spot.
Middays we stalked, working through roughly 150 to 250 acres of wooded ground.
Two things happened out there that taught more than any successful stalk would have.
The first was the wrestling match. The boys got bored, got distracted, and started horsing around. We jumped a nice doe and she was gone before anyone was ready. Nobody fired. We just lost the opportunity. They were genuinely frustrated with themselves, and I did not have to say much, because the woods had already made the point. Stay alert or stay home.
The second was the fenceline. We put a good stalk together and got inside 30 to 50 yards of a small group of deer. Then we looked at where they were standing. Wrong side of the property boundary. Not our ground, not our shot.
So we watched them and we left.
I want to be very clear about how I framed that for the boys, because this is where a lot of young hunters get the wrong lesson. That was not a failure. That was not bad luck. That was the hunt going exactly right. Knowing when not to shoot is not a limitation on hunting, it is the thing that separates a hunter from a guy with a rifle. Same with the unsafe angles we passed on later. You will take more deer over a lifetime by being the person who passes shots than by being the person who takes them.
The Evening It Came Together
Back to the blind.
One rifle between two young hunters was a deliberate call. Two loaded rifles and three boys in a confined elevated blind is more than one adult can supervise properly, and supervision is not something I was willing to run thin on. One rifle, passed under my direction, and my full attention on whoever was holding it.
The first two deer that came through gave us poor angles. We let them walk. The boys had already been trained on that, so it was not a disappointment, it was just the checklist working.
Then the doe and the small buck stepped out, and we had the shot we had been waiting four days for.
John told me afterward it was "really scary," which I appreciate more than if he had told me he was calm. He aimed behind the front leg, the way we had practiced on that deer vital steel, and he made the shot. He said he saw his doe do what he called "the death jump," and he figured right then she was done.
That is when I told him to give the gun to Hans.
In John's words: he was about to take another shot, but Dad said give the gun to Hans, so he did. He remembers watching Hans lock onto the little buck and get ready. He also noticed that "Hans was nervous to shoot the deer," which, considering Hans had just had a rifle go off beside his head, is fair.
Hans got himself settled and made his shot. The buck ran into a standing cornfield. Both animals died quickly.
Neither of these boys had ever shot at an animal before in their lives, and they both put their shot where it belonged while their bodies were in full adrenaline dump. Hans in particular had to reset himself after watching his cousin shoot, in about ten seconds, and still execute. I do not know how to describe how proud I was of that without underselling it.
What the Boys Said Afterward
The first thing out of both of them was about their hearts.
They were pounding, racing, hands shaking. And then one of them made the connection I had been hoping for since the first sprint drill back in the summer. This feels like practice. Not identical. But close.
That is the entire training program paying off in one sentence from an 11 year old. They had felt that before. They had already pressed a trigger with a heart rate like that. So their bodies did not hand them a brand new experience at the worst possible moment.
I told them both good job. John's version: "My dad said good job to us." And then, in his words, "It felt really good. I congratulated Hans, and he congratulated me."
I was feeling many things, including a quiet amount of relief, but mostly I was watching two kids be decent to each other about something they had both just earned.
A Birthday and a Family Meal
All of this happened over John's birthday. He turned 11 during the season.
We processed both deer that night. The family ate venison from those two deer on his birthday.
I am not going to oversell that, but I will say it is as clean a loop as hunting ever gives you. The kid trains all summer, makes a careful decision in the field, passes the shots that were not right, takes the one that was, and then feeds the people at his table with it the same night. That is the whole thing. That is why we do this.
I asked John what he would remember most about that birthday.
"That I got my first deer and I'll never forget about it."
Questions Parents Ask About Teaching Kids to Deer Hunt
What age should a kid start deer hunting?
In Minnesota the youth season opens it up at 10, so that is the legal floor. But the age is the easy part. I have seen 10 year olds who were ready and 14 year olds who were not. What actually decides it is whether the kid can hold a checklist in their head when they are excited, and whether they can sit still long enough to be in position when it matters. Start the training well before the age you plan to hunt them, and the age takes care of itself.
How do I know when my kid is actually ready to hunt deer?
When they can run the safety checklist out loud without being prompted, and when they can make hits after physical exertion rather than only from a calm bench. Readiness is about decision making under stress, not group size. If you have never seen your kid shoot with a racing heart, you do not yet know if they are ready.
What is a good first deer rifle for a kid?
Something that fits them, that they are not afraid of, and that can shoot a light practice load and a hunting load without changing the manual of arms. Low recoil and low report matter more than cartridge debates at this stage. A kid who flinches will not learn, no matter what is stamped on the barrel.
Do I need a suppressor to train a young shooter?
No, but it helps a lot. Reducing the report takes away a major source of flinch and makes long training sessions more productive. You still wear hearing protection with a suppressed rifle.
The full suppressor buying process, start to finish:
How do I keep a young hunter from getting bored on a long sit?
Give them a job. Mine ran the binoculars, called the wind, and looked at the aerial map with me. A kid who is participating in the decisions sits still far longer than a kid who is just told to be quiet. Also, be realistic about two to three hours as a ceiling, not a starting point.
Should I let two kids share one rifle in a blind?
If you are the only adult supervising, yes, I would. One loaded rifle that you control completely is safer than two you are splitting attention between in a confined space. It also forces a handoff moment, which is its own lesson in patience.
What do I say when my kid has to pass up a shot?
Tell them, in the moment, that passing was the right call and that they just did the hardest thing in hunting. Do not let it register as a loss. The kids who learn that passing is a win become the adults you want in a deer stand.
How far should a kid practice shooting?
Farther than you intend to let them shoot at an animal. We worked out to roughly 250 yards with a rangefinder and a dope card so that the actual hunting distance, 50 yards and under, felt routine. Train past the requirement and the requirement gets easy.
What to Read Next
Terminal performance is the one variable you cannot coach your way around. A kid can make a perfect shot and still have a bad outcome if the bullet is wrong for the velocity it arrives at, and at the short distances most youth hunts happen, that is a real consideration rather than a theoretical one.
Choosing the right hunting bullet matters as much as the rifle does:
The Part That Actually Mattered
People are going to read the headline and think this story is about two deer in ten seconds. It is not.
It is about a kid who handed off a rifle he wanted to keep shooting, because his dad told him to. It is about two boys who passed on deer across a fenceline and understood why. It is about three hours of sitting still, a wrestling match that cost them a doe, and a summer of sprinting before shooting steel.
The shot is the easy part. We spent months on everything else, and that is why the shot was easy.
If you are building a rifle for a young hunter, or working out what setup actually fits a kid rather than fits a catalog, that conversation is worth having before next season rather than in August. Current build slots are running 8 to 10 weeks out, and we ship completed builds back to customers nationwide. Full service list and current pricing at redlegguns.com/services-offered.
If you are serious about doing this the right way, not guessing, reach out.
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Last updated: October 2026 | Redleg Company, Chandler, MN
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