A question we get now and then from newer shooters revolves around when they should take the NROI Level 1, or “RO” seminar. The answer is pretty straightforward, “As soon as you can!” although there are a few qualifications and nuances you might want to consider.
[Read more…] about When to Take Your RO SeminarLet’s Get Retro – Part IIIc: – Shoot House
Shoot House type stages can be a lot of fun to run as staff, or they can be a nightmare. Traditionally, they are designed with generally anterograde movement combined with a fair bit of lateral movement. Sometimes they are totally enclosed leading to subdued light situations, sometimes they are just a whole lot of walls without a roof. Either way, they are a staple of our sport. Now and then you run into one that has at least a portion requiring retrograde movement due to movement down a passage to engage targets, and then having to reverse course to move to the next targets. There are, of course, several interesting variations on this.
[Read more…] about Let’s Get Retro – Part IIIc: – Shoot HouseRevisiting Freestyle
At a recent class a couple students approached me during a break because they were confused by the concept of freestyle as I had explained it during the lecture. Apparently a lot of the stages they shoot at their local matches are designed with and rely on heavy use of the 1.1.5.1 exemption from Freestyle (1.1.5) even to the extent of applying it to Long courses…which 1.1.5.1 explicitly forbids. Most of the stages they see involve boxes and the only time there is true freestyle occurs in larger contiguous shooting areas. Thus, they had come to associate freestyle with larger shooting areas and thought that shooting boxes precluded freestyle entirely.
[Read more…] about Revisiting FreestyleLet’s Get Retro – Part IIIb: U-Turn Stage
Let’s Get back to our discussion of Retrograde stage design. In this installment, we will examine a typical U-Turn type stage. There are myriad ways to design these types of stages and we are only going to look at a single example here but the concepts we will discuss can be applied to most of these variants.
[Read more…] about Let’s Get Retro – Part IIIb: U-Turn StageFixing Floppy USPSA Targets
I forget where I first heard about the concept of using small bamboo skewers to support the floppy upper scoring zone on USPSA cardboard targets so it isn’t possible for me to give credit where credit is due. For whomever first thought this one up, thank you!
[Read more…] about Fixing Floppy USPSA TargetsLet’s Get Retro – Part IIIa: Simple Retrograde Stage
Welcome back! In part I of this series we discussed some considerations for properly designing a retrograde, or “retreat”, stage. In part II we talked about how to run a retrograde stage as an RO team. Now let’s take a look at some example stages and discuss them from the stage design and RO standpoints. We will work through this as three separate posts.
[Read more…] about Let’s Get Retro – Part IIIa: Simple Retrograde StageOn Being Human
Despite our best efforts, we all show our human side now and then. That’s the side that is fallible. The side that we all love to hate. To err is human…or so they say. It is often how we handle that errors that defines us to others. Interestingly this seems to be something we all struggle with from early childhood until we shuffle off our mortal coil and pass on to whatever is next. And our human behavior affects every aspect of our lives including being an official at a USPSA/SCSA event.
[Read more…] about On Being HumanLet’s Get Retro – Part II: RO Considerations
In the first part of this series we talked about some of the design considerations we need to be concerned with when creating retrograde, aka “retreat” stages. In this installment, we will talk about some considerations ROs need to be aware of when tasked with running shooters through a retrograde stage.
[Read more…] about Let’s Get Retro – Part II: RO Considerations