Training Excerises for Noob Day - Built up area

[Oborous]

Thread for forest version of this

So... I drank the koolaid and now got "suckered" into running several of noob days.

We ran the first one, sixty people turned out. Seems like the 2nd noob day will have that high of a turn out or higher. The format it Safety Briefing, Training Exercises, Safety Briefing, Mini-Milsim (We're really stressing the safety, and some people are going to show up just for the mini-milsim).

Our chosen venue is a paintball place that the owner is very airsoft friendly; the place is built more an six sub-fields, rather than a balanced unified field, which is great for holding multiple different training exercises at a time. (Picture attached below). Our third day will be in a forested field to work on fieldcraft and those skills that need trees.



I'm wondering what exercises people have experienced or ran for noob days? We are building up complete noobs here, so nothing is too basic, however yelling and screaming at them isn't going to work. We need to have them understand that they want to do things a proper way rather than just tell them. We need them to get that "Ah, I get it" moment.

In discussions, we've come up with four core skills.
1) How to Move
2) How to Shoot
3) How to Work in a Team
4) How to use a Radio.
(Really, three, that using a radio is apart of teamwork, but it's large enough that it needs to be on it's own... Disable VOX!!)

I/We want exercises that start showing the value of combining two or more of these core skills at once. Exercises that also show more advanced usages of these core skills are also welcome (such as proper positioning from shooting behind cover). We're looking at multiple simultatenous exercises running in the various sub-fields so we can run everyone through them while still having decent supervision.

Right now some of our ideas are:

1 Rifle vs. 3 Pistol, (All on semi-auto) I've done this several times and think it's great. The three pistol guys need to work together because of the range disadvantage, where as the rifle needs to realize how easily he can be outflanked and need to agressively move else the pistol guys will push him into a corner and then just rush him at once. The thing to stress is it's a team win or team loose, so even if two of the three pistols get zapped, it's still a win for them.

Static 'guardpost' vs. mover. This is three people, basically you're trading off positions. One person is moving, one is resting, one is the 'guard' (doesn't move). The mover becomes the rest person, the guard becomes the mover, and the person resting becomes the guard. This is a progressive exercise, where the guard starts off shooting slowly for a run, the mover is just trying to get to the otherside without getting hit too much, then you progressively allow faster guard shooting, and then allow the mover to start shooting back, a hit on the guard knocks them out for three seconds, and start allowing the guard to duck for cover. Shows movement and combining movement with shooting, and that shooting -isn't- goal here, getting to the end is.

Team Pairs, two teams of two people, manuvering within a moderately sized area. If one person of the pair dies, both people are 'out'. The more advanced version requires radios for everyone, two teams of two fireteams of two people (i.e. 4 people vs. 4 people) that on one side, only one fireteam can be moving at a time, and you must hand off 'movement' to the other fireteam via radio. If both fireteams are moving at the same time, you're team is out.

No-mans-land. Mark off a line that teams cannot cross, basically is an elimination firefight with a fair amount of cover that you can't always move to the best position because of no-mans-land. The more advanced versions are use two L shaped areas for play so long-side & shortside for each team, (sorta like an L upside down and a rightside up L interlinked for one team to fight the other) so you have flanking. The most advanced is two U shaped play areas interlinked so you have to remember to watch your six. This would be teams of 4-6 vs. similar number.

Suggestions for improvements or other ideas