This week on the podcast, I discuss some aspects of both the 2024 Area 6 and Carolina Classic matches: staff reset and cash-only sponsorship, as well as the video coverage of the recent USPSA Handgun Nationals.

To subscribe to the podcast, search “Short Course” in your podcast app, or add https://berryshooting.com/short-course.xml by URL. #uspsa #ipscshooting #ncsection #area6

The post #136: Carolina Classic (2024), Part 1 appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This week on the podcast, I talk about how things went running chrono at the 2023 Carolina Classic.

To subscribe to the podcast, search “Short Course” in your podcast app, or add https://berryshooting.com/short-course.xml by URL.

The post #111: Chrono at the Carolina Classic (2023) appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This week on the podcast, I talk about things that went well and lessons learned from this year’s Carolina Clasic match.

To subscribe to the podcast, search “Short Course” in your podcast app, or add https://berryshooting.com/short-course.xml by URL.

The post #110: Carolina Classic (2023), Part 1 appeared first on Berry Shooting.

This week on the podcast, I go over how I shot the 2022 Carolina Classic, as well as review things that went well and lessons learned from how the match was run.

The post #79: Carolina Classic 2022 Lessons Learned appeared first on Berry Shooting.

Setup

Thursday was the build day, and it was mostly uneventful. When I was helping with setting up Stage 4, which was my design, the setup we’d used at a club match for the hiding double-plate swinger before activation just wouldn’t work here. So we made the call and changed it to a single plate swinger and added another popper to keep the round count consistent. The new sequence of going activator, big popper, swinging plate was still pretty interesting and definitely rewarded shooters who got right.

Also, after having watched 200 or so competitors shoot the stage, I am of the mind that the back left and back right positions were just pointlessly duplicative. Removing the back left position would have made the whole stage better in a few ways. First, dropping the round count from 29 to 25 would give competitors more options of where to reload and more ammo. Second, it would make a wider range of stage plans more viable, since cutting to the middle left position on the start would be weighed against going to the right first and not having to back up. Having two positions where you had to stop hard and post up also just distracted from what was, in my opinion, the interesting challenge of the stage, which was navigating the front two positions and the barrels in the shooting area.

My Match

This was my third USPSA match in CO, although I’d shot a handful of other matches and practice sessions with the dot. I was feeling generally comfortable with the overall setup, which I think mostly showed in my performance. My mindset at the match was to focus on gripping the gun well, and shoot the second shot on each target as soon as the dot was back. The end result was decent but not overwhelming speed but aiming pretty hard on every medium-difficulty-or-harder target. Across 8 of the 9 stages, I had a total of 22 charlies which is pretty respectable. (The other stage was 3 charlies but 2 deltas as well. Hosing too fast.) I am also quite happy–especially for shooting on staff day–that I didn’t have a single visualization or execution mistake. I executed every stage according to plan which has been a struggle for me in the past.

Stages

There are only a few individual stage performances that are worth saying something about specifically.

Stage 7, my first of the day, didn’t really have any options to speak of, just two positions and a swinger that you pretty much had to get on the first swing. I knew it was an aggressive plan, but shooting it, I didn’t feel out of control at any point. Everything went exactly as visualized which was a bit of surprise. Good start to the day.

Stage 2 is the one where I had the two deltas–ironic because it was certainly the stage with the easiest shot difficulty of any. My GoPro beeped and turned off halfway through, which was a minor distraction. The third target was charlie delta with a good group, so that was just an error with transitioning to the wrong spot. I don’t know that I could have moved through it much quicker, but definitely getting more grip on the gun and returning it faster would have helped me get done shooting the targets sooner as I moved through.

Other than that, I ended up aiming a lot, despite that not really being a conscious focus of my planning and visualization. Given the sparse practice I’ve had this year and being relatively new to the gun, I’m definitely happier with a conservative, consistent result than swinging for the fences. I don’t feel that the gun is holding me back. Even the availability of ammo hasn’t been a huge issue since I’ve adjusted my practice to use low round count drills. There’s just a certain amount of time behind the gun required to really keep moving up to the next level that I’m not able to dedicate in dry fire and live fire right now.

Summary

Switching to CO for this match was definitely the right call. There was a ton of heat in the division and it was an interesting test to get really let the high cap gun stretch its legs. I’m still pretty ambivalent about shooting a dot versus irons, but it’s undeniable that you can just get more shooting done when you’re not having to reload every four targets. Not really sure what I shoot after this. Can’t say I’m hooked on CO per se, but going back to 10 rounds doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs either.

The post Carolina Classic 2021 Wrapup appeared first on Berry Shooting.

The way that most major matches run chrono, including Nationals in my experience, would be trivially easy to cheat if you wanted to. Just keep a box or mag of full-power chrono ammo in your bag and take it with you when you walk up to chrono, and you can use whatever else you want for the rest of the match. The only people that the current system catches are incompetent cheaters and people unlucky enough to tinker with their load or run untested ammo.

Do I think that there is an epidemic of cheating chrono in USPSA? Probably not. But then again, if there were, how would we know?

So if you imagine someone was at your match with a special box of chrono ammo, how could you catch them?

One idea that we tried quite successfully at the 2019 Carolina Classic was the simplest. At the stage right before chrono, which happened to be the stage I was working, we had a handful of ziploc bags for each squad. As each shooter finished the stage, we had one person assigned to pick up the mag(s) they had used in the stage and shuck out 8 rounds. If there weren’t that many in the mags from the ground, we’d pause the scoring of targets to ask them for the remainder (or in the case of PCC, the entirety) of the 8 rounds from the mag they had just unloaded from the gun, as best we could tell.

The bags for each competitor got bundled together with a zip tie, and handed to to the shooter who happened to be going first for the chrono to carry with the squad. That way, if someone did want to tamper with the bags they’d have to talk to that person, and then re-do the bags with the zip tie. Maybe it’s paranoid, but it only cost us a zip tie to do, so why not?

The feedback from the shooters was good. The ones that had nothing to hide loved it and appreciated knowing everyone else was playing above board too.

We started running the 2020 Carolina Classic the same way, but unfortunately ended up tossing chrono because of unrelated issues, which is a shame. I was looking forward to having a second test run of the system.

What are some other approaches you could take?

What if chrono wasn’t a mandated stop on the schedule? What if the threat of being pulled to chrono at the end of any given stage was enough to keep shooters from risking it?

Imagine having someone roaming around on a golf cart. You finish a stage, sign your score sheet, and are told to hop on the golf cart, you’re taking a quick trip to chrono, with only the mags you have on you.

Or maybe the same guy on the golf cart, asks for 8 rounds taken out of the mags you used on the stage to be held at chrono. You can show up any time you want, but if you do not turn up before the end of the match, you will be assumed to have failed to make power factor and shoot for no score?

I’m not saying we have cracked the code on how to do this right. I’m just saying its is self-evidently possible to do it better, and we should figure it out. Whether or not it’s “worth” cheating in this sport, people do it big and small. Let’s not make it any easier on them than we have to.

The post Chrono: Trust, but verify appeared first on Berry Shooting.

When you pay your match fee for a Level 2 or above match, what are you actually buying? Debugged stages? Consistent staff for every stage? More competition? Trophies?

I submit that it is also entirely reasonable for big matches to have staff do all the pasting and reset for you, leaving you to just worry about refilling your mags and visualizing your stage plans.

As a rule of thumb, short courses should have at least two people, medium courses at least three people, and long courses at least four people working the stage, including the timer and tablet RO. That way, when the shooter has completed the course of fire, the timer RO walks through the stage, calling out scores to the tablet RO. When they’ve scored the last target, the tablet RO goes off to get the shooter’s approval on the score, and if necessary copy the score to a paper backup.

(Both the 2019 and 2020 NC matches used carbon backups, and I found on my stage that it’s faster to just have the tablet RO copy it over on their own. Calling out the scores to a second person who writes them down seems like it would be faster, but in practice just isn’t. Instead, it just makes work for two people instead of one.)

While the tablet RO chases down the shooter and gets their sign-off, the timer RO then turns around and starts pasting back toward where the scoring started. The additional staff each have an assigned place to start pasting, and everyone works to paste their section of the stage. The timer RO is the last person to come uprange. As soon as they are uprange of the start position, they can start the next shooter with a crisp “Make ready.” (But what if the next shooter isn’t there? Trust me, if the competitors don’t have any job to be doing except shooting, they’ll be there.)

So that’s how it works. Let’s go through the benefits, starting with the match staff.

At the scale of a match, having staff reset will deliver the minimum shooter-to-shooter time any day of the week. Staff are faster to reset, with fewer people, because there is no question who is pasting which target. Staff aren’t worried about getting paint on their hands while resetting steel. Staff can have specific tools like paster guns that speed up the process. Staff are there for one job, and don’t need to conserve their energy for later stages of the day.

With staff pasting and resetting, you eliminate reshoots due to unpasted targets. You can trust that the hard cover got painted after each shooter (because it was one person’s job, verified by the timer RO), so you can quickly and accurately judge if a hit was full or partial diameter.

You also eliminate an entire class of cheating where the shooter clips a no-shoot and his buddy prematurely pastes a target on the other side of the stage, which forces the match staff to issue a reshoot. If the staff is resetting, the only non-staff downrange of the shooting area should be the competitor or their delegate, and you can watch the one or two of them more easily than a half-dozen competitors. (Having the staff wearing matching shirts helps too. See “Staff Package” below.)

Okay so this all sounds great. What’s the catch? Nothing in life is free. What does it cost to make this happen?

The first part of making staff reset work is that you have to take care of your staff. You have to recruit and retain quality, by-the-book, hardworking ROs. You don’t just post a Google Form somewhere and anyone that can fog a mirror gets a free match and a t-shirt. You reach out to people you’ve worked with before. In short, you don’t just wait for it to happen, you make it happen.

You also actually have to take care of them. Communicate with your staff clearly via email so folks know when to be where and what to bring. Have some prizes set aside for your staff, do not just let them pick over whatever’s left on the prize table Sunday evening. Feed them good meals. Don’t take them for granted. This cannot be faked. If a match treats you as an interchangeable cog, you feel it and you don’t sign up to work the next year.

The second part is money. You need to have a budget for your match that includes paying for however many staff you need. Ball-park it at your number of stages plus one for chrono plus one for error times 4 ROs. Include not just the match fees but the entire staff package. Budget for your other costs like consumables for the match and so on. Then set the match fee high enough to cover it. The NC Section this year cost $140 and managed to break even with the match about two thirds full.

If your match fee is higher than other matches around you, people will complain. But you are providing a higher quality product and the people that want to buy it are willing to pay. It might take a few years for the word to get out, but the competitors who are really invested in the sport and want to shoot at their absolute peak will be lining up to shoot a full-staff reset match.

Staff Package

Here’s what the 2019 and 2020 NC Section staff package was: firstly, the standard free match fee and staff shirt (same design as the match shirt, but a distinct color not available to the public making it easy to spot staff during the match). Also new in 2020, each staff member got a coozie and an insulated tumbler with the match logo and “Staff” on it, as a practical thank-you.

Additionally, staff got $150 for travel and lodging, with an additional $100 if they lived more than 50 miles from the range (and would presumably be staying in a hotel).

There was the usual group rate at the hotel.

There was the equal shot at the prize table, as mentioned previously.

There was boxed lunch on the range for the ROs. Your stage didn’t have to send one person to the buffet line to get a plate for everyone. As the staff, the lunch comes to you, on a golf cart or in the trunk of a car. It’s hard to overstate how important this is. The way to your staff’s heart is through their stomachs. There is something surprisingly effecting about someone looking out for you and making sure you’re fed. Again, take care of your staff, and mean it.

The post Staff Reset appeared first on Berry Shooting.

It’s become somewhat common at matches to cut walkthroughs down to 4 or even 3 minutes in an effort, misguided in my opinion, to save time and get more shooters through the match.

First, this is bad for competitors. On any given stage, one of two things will be true. Either the stage will have a small shooting area, in which case it takes longer for each person on the squad to get a view of each position–and on good stages, how to cheat/blend them. Alternately, the stage will have a large shooting area and multiple positions, at which point having the extra time is useful.

But more importantly, shorter walkthroughs are bad for the ROs and CROs working the stages. Assuming that squads are flowing evenly through each bay of the match, the staff on each stage won’t have time between squads to wait for the next one. This means their only downtime, their only chance to sit and take a load off is during the competitors’ walkthrough. Having 5 minutes to sit down, eat a snack, drink some water, and just rest every 20-25 minutes (8-10 shooter squads at 2.5 minutes/shooter) makes a difference.

Cutting your staff’s rest time below the typical 5 minutes just wears them out, and will inevitably lead to more mistakes and lower morale from your staff.

But let’s come back to the competitor side of things for a minute. The math for 3-minute walkthroughs is appealing: you save 2 minutes per stage, which on a 10-stage match is a free and clear 20 minutes in your schedule. But the common response for shortened walkthroughs is competitors taking up extra time at make ready (or just taking longer to come to the line and be ready). If each of the 10 competitors on a squad takes 12 seconds longer at make ready, there goes your two minutes. If the margins of your match running successfully are backing up are that thin, you have other problems.

If you are really serious about keeping competitors moving, the only way to truly make that happen is staff reset. More on that tomorrow.

The post Five Minute Walkthroughs appeared first on Berry Shooting.

Typically you only walk a prize table at bigger Area matches and Nationals where all the shooters end on the same day and there is a formal awards ceremony. Because of the multi-day schedule, only half the competitors will be on the range each day, which poses a problem.

Most level 2 matches solve this by just randomly assigning each prize to a competitor, and when you check in you find out if you’ve won a prize, and if so what it is. Less than ideal.

It’s also not great for the sponsor who donated product to advertise at the match. With the typical approach, only the person who receives a particular prize knows which sponsor contributed it.

Last year at the 2019 Carolina Classic, the match tried out a different system: you walk the prize table when you check in before your scheduled shooting session. (Due to the 2018 NC Section being scrubbed by Hurricane Matthew, there were a lot of extra sponsor prizes, so the main concern was that they wouldn’t all be gone and have to be stored for another year.)

The prizes were divvied up into 4 equal batches, and one put for each of the four shooting schedules. The prizes were all laid out, and the early bird got the worm. Of course, this meant the most expensive prizes were generally picked up first, but dollar values aren’t everything. An expensive accessory for a gun you don’t shoot is worthless.

This solves three problems.

First, a sponsor who puts prizes on the prize table gets noticed even by competitors who don’t pick up their prize. Even though you might put ten prizes on the prize table, you might have 100 people look at it and see that your company supported the match, versus the 10 that actually received the prize in the traditional approach.

Second, the “pink range bag” problem. As a match, if a sponsor donates a bunch of range bags and one is pink, do you pick a shooter registered as female at random and give it to her? Do you give it randomly to all the shooters? If you let the shooters walk the prize table, the person who wants it can take it. It might be a female shooter, it might be a dad, uncle, or granddad that knows someone who would love to have it.

Third, the issue of trying to pawn off or trade a prize you got but have no use for. In years past, I’ve randomly drawn a $200 gift certificate to a custom gun maker that I wasn’t going to use and was quite happy to swap it for a hundred bucks cash to someone who was planning to buy a gun from that maker anyway. This year at a major match in another state, I won a welded steel target stand. I already have a matching set of target stands I use for practice and had no use for another one. I ended up just donating that one to get it out of the garage and make space.

By allowing shooters to walk the prize table, they get to pick the prize that is not necessarily the most expensive, but is the most valuable to them.

For 2020, the match tweaked the formula a bit. Once again the prizes were divided into four groups, and then each group had the more expensive prizes set on a separate table. In each session, a limited number of competitors were randomly assigned to the higher prize table (although of course they could have taken a prize from either table if they chose).

This worked out to be a nice hybrid of letting shooters pick the prize that is most useful to them individually which rewards shooters who show up early (to avoid a backup of shooters showing up at the last minute), while also not requiring you to show up early to get a decent prize.

I have to say, I don’t think this is necessarily the absolute best way to do prize tables for matches like this. But I will say it beats the standard method, and it’s worth giving a thought to how to continue to improve how it’s done.

The post Walking the Prize Table appeared first on Berry Shooting.

It’s been a few months now since the 2020 Carolina Classic, and I wanted to reiterate all the things that went into the planning and execution of the match that went well, to hopefully be emulated by more matches in the future. This is the first of a series that will be posted, one each day, for the next five days.

Match Format

The schedule for the match started on Thursday with the build day. The staff shot Friday in an all-day format, with 10-person squads.

Saturday had two half-day sessions with squads of 8 shooters starting at 8am and 1pm, with time scheduled in between sessions for the ROs to eat lunch and the afternoon competitors to inspect stages.

Sunday was the full-day session, starting at 10am with squads of 10 shooters each.

Competitors also had the option to shoot Friday with the expectation that they help paste and reset because it was first and foremost staff day. Some competitors did choose to pay their match fee and go this route. One shooter on my squad said it was easier for him to get time off work than to take time away from his family on the weekends and he prefers to shoot major matches during the week. Makes sense to me.

The half-day Saturday schedule definitely has its fans, particularly folks driving from out of state. A few folks drove up Saturday morning, looked at the stages from noon to 1, shot until 5, and then drove home the same day. It’s a lot of time on the road, but it saves a night in a hotel.

I was working the match, but if I weren’t, my preference would be the full-day Sunday format. With staff doing the paste and reset, you cycle through stages pretty quickly, so I like having the larger squad to give me extra time to prepare on each stage between shooting.

Stage Inspection

This match didn’t do anything particularly special, just what’s the norm for US matches: inspection of stages once competitors are done for the day, time in the morning if competitors show up early, and time between the morning and afternoon schedules on Saturday.

It’s worth noting that although matches with half-day formats will plan a break between morning and afternoon, if the morning schedule gets behind, that can quickly go out the window and the first afternoon squad starts as soon as the last morning one finishes. This is bad for the staff because they have no mid-day rest to eat their lunch, and bad for the half-day competitors who are robbed of their equal chance to inspect stages.

Thanks to staff reset, this hasn’t happened for either of the last two years here in NC. Morning competitors finish on time or early, staff get their chance to recharge for the afternoon, and afternoon competitors get a look at the stages if they like.

All of that said, the stages were designed not to require extensive walkthrough: no memory stages, no gotchas, no games. If you did only have the 5 minute walkthrough during the match (more on that later), you could at least come up with a workable stage plan for each stage. Of course, you could invest more time than that, but it was not a de facto requirement.

Join me tomorrow when I’ll talk about the process used at this match to walk the prize table.

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