NROI.ORG

USPSA - National Range Officers Institute

Kevin Imel

Let’s Get Retro – Part IIIc: – Shoot House

by

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 House

Revisiting Freestyle

by

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 Freestyle

Let’s Get Retro – Part IIIb: U-Turn Stage

by

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 Stage

Let’s Get Retro – Part IIIa: Simple Retrograde Stage

by

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 Stage

On Being Human

by

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 Human

Let’s Get Retro – Part II: RO Considerations

by

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