February 02, 2004

By: Udo Liszt
Website: http://www./

World's first RapidShot Hockey Shooting Centre

Cambridge has been selected to be the home for the world's first RapidShot Hockey Shooting Centre. The brain child of German brothers, Hans and Rudolf Linner, the RapidShot shooting system continually delivers perfect passes to a shooter, randomly highlights targets to shoot at, provides instant feedback of shooting speed, accuracy and reaction time and automatically collects the pucks allowing you to shoot up to 1000 shots per hour.

After engineering the system in Germany and submitting the international patent application, the Linners ran tests with members of the German National hockey team and began to plan the launch of the first RapidShot Shooting Centre. Cambridge was picked after a systematic investigation on the Internet, said Rudolf. The criteria was a mid-sized but growing town, not too far away from Toronto, industrial, with good infrastructure.

The inventors manufactured all the components for a four lane RapidShot Shooting Centre in the summer of 2001 and shipped them from Germany to Mississauga in February of this year. Hans made the trip to Canada to set up the Cambridge centre and said he is quite pleased with their decision. We found a nice space, great neighbours, helpful town officials and great infrastructure. But more than we had expected, almost everybody in Cambridge is attached to hockey somehow!

The brothers have teamed up with Canadian businessman and entrepreneur, Matt Bondy, and together intend to use a franchise model to launch RapidShot shooting centres across North America. Based on the reaction of coaches who have tried the system, RapidShot is a concept that is long overdue, says Bondy. You have batting cages for baseball and driving ranges for golf, but until now there has been no effective way to burn off some steam firing pucks. The instant feedback makes RapidShot an excellent way to systematically improve your shot, but we are finding people taking interest just for fun or exercise.

Cambridge Minor Hockey Association president, John Hamilton calls RapidShot a must see for any young hockey players who wish to improve their shooting skills. RapidShot combines a learning experience with a fun time, says Hamilton, and for kids, that is the best combination.

A unique feature of the model is an online world ranking system that is hosted on the RapidShot web site at www.rapidshot.ca. Any player can see where they stand in the world rankings for their age group based on their shooting performance up until the previous day. RapidShot represents the first open world ranking system in the history of sport, said Bondy. Trying to beat your own past performance can be addictive, but I can see the battle for top rankings in a region becoming very competitive.

Saturday's Grand Opening of the Cambridge RapidShot Shooting Centre will give people the opportunity to meet Hans Linner, shoot for free, win prizes and enjoy a BBQ with all proceeds going to support THE KiD ZONE charity.

Also see: training aids

About The Author:

Udo Liszt is a successful author and regular contributor to http://www./.  Find hockey apparel, bags, gloves, gear, sticks, skates, training aids and much more.