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 ConsiderationsShot Per View
The October Question of the Month was “A long course has a shooting position where more than 8 shots are available. Is this a legal stage?” Thankfully, most of you got this one right. Although enough of you got it wrong that we should take a deeper look into this situation to ensure we are all on the same page.
[Read more…] about Shot Per ViewLet’s Get Retro – Part I: Stage Design
When I first got into this sport longer ago than I care to admit (okay, 2002), retrograde stages, aka “retreat stages”, that is moving from down range to up range, really didn’t show up very often. I suspect they were around but I didn’t see one until around 2005/2006. Nowadays, we often find them in most majors and a lot of club matches have taken to using them as well. They do present a unique challenge to the shooter and are a unique problem to solve. Let’s dive in and take a closer look at some things to consider when designing retrograde stages.
[Read more…] about Let’s Get Retro – Part I: Stage Design