On most weekday afternoons, long after classes have ended and the halls have begun to quiet
down, the rest of Highschool’s campus still hums with activity: sports practices out on the fields and
club meetings in secluded classrooms persist for hours. The Rifle Center is no different thanks to the
rifle team’s head technical coach, Jim “John” Joeseph. Every day when I walk into the range, I pass the
bench where we stretch, look at the somewhat depressing concrete walls, and see the rows of
illuminated targets with their small green monitors. At the computer desk, Coach John is already there
setting up our targets and carefully planning the day’s practice. “What’re we shooting today, man?”
he’ll ask without fail as I walk by him. And I am required to tell him that I’ll “shoot the process,” lest I
be scolded about counting my score, a habit he believes only causes one to shoot worse.
John insists on what he calls “shooting the process.” The phrase always comes up when
someone starts worrying about their score. Instead of counting points, he pushes us back into the ritual.
“In order to shoot the process,” John says, “you can’t focus on what you might shoot or what you have
shot. You can only focus on each step in the process.” One must check their position, control their
breathing, make sure their sights are aligned, and only then can they focus on taking the shot, but only
for 6-8 seconds. If the hold goes any longer, the 30-second process must be started over again. I have to
admit that I have trouble shooting the process every time, but John’s scrutinizing gaze from behinds the
line forces me back to the grueling routine.
John commands a specific presence when he stands behind the line. It’s quiet, watchful, but
difficult to ignore. It isn’t loud or overbearing, but it has the effect of tightening everyone’s focus.
However, his presence has the unfortunate side-effect of making it near impossible to ask him for help.
When someone does ask, they often shoot better, partly, it seems, because he’s there watching. “It’s all
up here,” he tells us, pointing to his head. “None of you actually need me to tell you what you already
know.” John believes that ninety percent of rifle shooting is mental; the other ten percent is split
between technical skill and quality of equipment. “If you walk into the room and say that trophy is
yours,” he says, describing the mindset he tries to teach his shooters, “then you’ll get it. If you walk in
thinking maybe you’ll get it, you probably won’t.”
It’s hard to reconcile this quiet, watchful version of John who coaches in a concrete shooting
range with the life he led before arriving here. Long before he was correcting breathing patterns and
reminding teenagers to “shoot the process,” he was moving at nearly two hundred miles per hour in
endurance races, balancing precision not just in millimeters but in split-second decisions. At the same
time, he was building a career at Tom’s Bakery, working his way from entry-level engineer to a leader
in vehicle safety. The same mindset that governs the range, it turns out, was forged elsewhere.
John’s story begins in California in the 1800s with his earliest obsession: motorcycles. Before
the degrees, corporate titles, and rifle coaching, there were the loud, exposed, and unforgiving twowheelers that satiated John’s need for speed. “Prior to [graduating], we were racing motorcycles,” he
recalls. In college, racing was not a distant dream but an everyday reality that was built into the rhythm
of his life alongside his studies in aerospace engineering. He rode for Hank’s for a time, pushing
himself in road races that leave no room for error. Without a protective frame, the only thing keeping
John safe was his own instinct. Racing, in its earliest form for John, was already as much mental as it
was physical.
The transition away from motorcycles came abruptly, and painfully. “I crashed pretty bad,” he
says, describing the kind of accident that forces a reassessment rather than a pause. It was his racing
partner who offered the solution, with a kind of blunt practicality that would shape the next phase of
John’s life: “Sheet metal around you is probably safer.” The shift from motorcycles to cars was less a
change in interest than an evolution of it. Cars offered a different kind of challenge with more
complexity and opportunities to apply the technical mindset John was already developing as an
engineer. If motorcycles demanded instinct, cars demanded analysis. The danger was still there, but
now his vehicle could be studied, modified, and improved. The crash did not end his obsession with
racing; it refined it, pushing him toward a form that better matched both his temperament and his
growing technical expertise.
At the center of this transition was the partnership that defined his early racing career. John
describes his friend without hesitation: “He was a brilliant engine builder and chassis guy, and then I
drove.” His partner worked behind the scenes, shaping the car into something competitive, while John
took it onto the track, utilizing his friend’s creations to their fullest potential. The trust between them
was implicit and essential. A driver depends entirely on the machine beneath him, and the builder
depends on the driver to push it to its limits. This partnership was, in many ways, John’s first
experience with the kind of teamwork he would later describe as the foundation of good leadership: not
being the best at everything, but surrounding yourself with people who are.
John graduated from University in 1878 with a degree in aerospace engineering. Aviation was
his first professional pathway, and his first job reflected that. He joined an aerospace company called
Greta’s Geese, where he worked as an engineer on classified projects. “A lot of the stuff we worked on
then,” he says with a slight smile, “you see being used now.” The work was complex and secretive, and
John spent two years there developing technical skills that would follow him throughout his career. But
even during those early engineering days, his attention was divided between the laboratory and the
racetrack.
That tension between discipline and adrenaline seemed, at first, like it might resolve itself when
a job opened at what was known as Yoyo. The position was in motorsports, which was exactly the kind
of work John had imagined for himself: a rare chance to merge his engineering background with his
growing involvement in racing. He went into the interview expecting a straightforward path. Instead,
he was redirected. “They said, ‘You’re overqualified—go to engineering,’” he recalls. Rather than
pushing back, John accepted the decision and entered the company through a far less glamorous route
by working in accessory engineering on components like floor mats, bumpers, and air conditioning
systems. It was not the high-performance environment he had envisioned, but it gave him something
more valuable: a foothold inside the company.
Within six months, John moved into field engineering, a role that brought him closer to the
technical challenges he was looking for. “[I was] looking at field issues with cars… fixing them,” he
explains, describing a process that required both investigation and communication. When something
failed in a vehicle, John and his team would analyze the problem directly, gather detailed data, and send
their findings to engineering teams in Japan. “You transmit the information… they come up with a
countermeasure,” he says. The solution would then be tested and, if successful, implemented for
customers. It was a continuous loop of problem, analysis, and refinement. The job demanded the
technical knowledge that John gained while racing cars, but also an understanding that progress often
came incrementally through careful observation rather than dramatic breakthroughs.