How To Stay Proficient As A Volunteer Firefighter (When You Only Run A Call A Week)

Roughly 65 percent of US firefighters in the United States are volunteer, according to the National Volunteer Fire Council and the US Fire Administration. That number is staggering when you think about how the fire service is usually portrayed. Most of the firefighters protecting most of the geography of this country are people who hold a day job, eat dinner with their family, and respond to a pager when the tones drop. They do not run twelve calls a shift. Some volunteers run twelve calls a year on a working incident, and the rest of the time they are running EMS, alarms, and public assists.

The proficiency problem is real and it is not the volunteer's fault. Skills decay. The latest research on motor skill retention in emergency services suggests that complex psychomotor skills like SCBA emergency procedures, hose handling under stress, and forcible entry start to degrade within 90 days of last practice. If you are pulling line on a working fire once a quarter, that is not enough exposure to keep those skills sharp. Reading more does not fix it. You need reps.

The good news is that proficiency is solvable for the volunteer who is willing to be deliberate about it. Career firefighters get proficient through volume. Volunteers have to get proficient through structure. Different path, same destination, and a few volunteers in every department are operating at a level that would make a career captain take notice. Here is how they do it.

The science on skill decay in emergency response is sobering. Studies on CPR retention, intubation skills, and SCBA emergency procedures consistently show that without deliberate practice, performance falls off a cliff somewhere between three and six months after the initial training. CPR compression quality drops measurably at 90 days. Pediatric assessment skills degrade within six months. The fireground equivalents follow the same curve.

This matters because most volunteer training models were built on the assumption that an annual or quarterly drill keeps you proficient. It does not. It keeps you familiar. There is a difference. Familiarity is recognizing the gear and remembering the steps when you have time to think. Proficiency is executing under stress, in the dark, with a low air alarm sounding, while your partner is trying to find the door.

The volunteer firefighter who wants to stay proficient cannot rely on the department training schedule alone. Most departments drill once or twice a month, and a meaningful share of that drill time is consumed by administrative work, gear checks, and apparatus familiarization. The actual hands-on reps are limited. If you want to be sharp when the tones drop, you have to build a personal training program that supplements the department program.

Not every skill decays at the same rate, and not every skill is equally important for survival. The smart volunteer prioritizes the skills that are most perishable and most consequential. Five domains rise to the top.

SCBA emergency procedures. Mask removal, sharing air, emergency egress, low air procedures, mayday transmission. These are the skills that keep you alive when something goes wrong inside. They decay quickly because they are anaerobic, stressful, and require fine motor coordination that does not transfer from cognitive practice. You need physical reps.

Hose handling under stress. Pulling, advancing, flowing, repositioning. The volunteer who only handles hose at the quarterly drill is going to fumble the stretch on a real call. Practice in different configurations. Practice with one hand. Practice with reduced visibility. Practice with crew that does not communicate well, because that happens.

Search patterns and orientation. The number one cause of firefighter disorientation is task fixation combined with poor wall and hose tracking. Solo and partner search drills, even in your own garage with the lights off, build the muscle memory that keeps you oriented when the smoke drops you to the floor.

Forcible entry and ventilation. These are infrequent skills on a call but high-consequence when needed. A volunteer department in a rural area may go years between forcible entry events. The skill is gone by then if it is not maintained. Practice on a prop. If your department does not have one, build one out of pallets and 2x4s.

Patient assessment and primary survey. Most of your calls are EMS, not fire. Yet many volunteer EMS protocols are loose enough that providers fall into bad habits. Drill the primary survey the way it is supposed to be done, with the airway-breathing-circulation rhythm, every single time. Audit yourself on the next ten EMS calls and ask whether you actually did a clean primary or skipped to the chief complaint.

The volunteer who stays proficient typically dedicates two to four hours per week to deliberate training outside of department drills. That is less than most people spend watching television in two evenings. The structure that works for most volunteers looks something like this.

Twenty minutes, three times a week, on perishable physical skills. SCBA donning while seated. Mask up and breathing through the regulator. Knot tying with gloves on. Search patterns on the kitchen floor with eyes closed. These are short sessions. They do not require apparatus. They require discipline.

One hour per week on cognitive material. Reading IFSTA, reviewing department SOPs, studying building construction or fire behavior. This is where most volunteers spend all their study time, and it is the lowest-value bucket if it is the only thing you do. Cognitive knowledge supports physical performance but does not replace it.

One longer session every other week, ideally two hours, that combines physical and decision-making practice. Drive past a structure on your day off, park, and run a verbal size-up out loud. Pretend you are first due. Call your arrival report, your conditions, your actions, and your needs. Building the verbal pattern under low stress means it will be there under high stress.

Some volunteers add a peer training partner. A fellow volunteer from the same department or a neighboring department who meets at the station once a week for thirty minutes of hands-on reps. The accountability matters as much as the content. The volunteers who train alone tend to drift. The volunteers who train with a partner stay sharp.

The honest truth is that most volunteers cannot run extra drills at the station whenever they feel like it. The bay is locked. The training officer has a day job. The truck is needed for response. So the question becomes how to get reps without burning station hours.

The answer for most modern volunteers is some combination of mental rehearsal, physical drills at home, and digital training tools that let you train on your own time. Mental rehearsal sounds soft but the research on it is strong. Surgeons, special operations military units, and elite athletes all use it. Spending fifteen minutes visualizing a working fire response, step by step from tone-out through overhaul, builds the neural patterns that reduce hesitation on the real call.

A platform like StruckBox was built for exactly this gap. The volunteer who cannot get to the station for an extra drill can pull up the daily size-up scenario on a phone over morning coffee, run a voice-graded scenario in the truck on the way to work, or knock out an NREMT quiz set during a lunch break. The reps are short, the feedback is immediate, and the skills are the ones that matter most for someone who does not see high call volume. Volunteers in particular benefit because the platform does not require department buy-in or station time. You sign up, you train when you have ten minutes, and you stay sharp between actual calls. Try it free at /try and see whether structured at-home reps fit into your week.