Free Advice

As major match season winds down, we are all sharing stories about things that have happened at matches. We hear talk about the stage designs, about the prize tables, about the food on the range, the tight races for the top competitors, things that happened at chronograph, and about match staff. It’s always appreciated when Match Directors and Range Masters get positive reviews and comments about match staff. But it is very frustrating when negative comments are brought up post-match and nothing was said during the match.

We’ve all been there. A call is made at a match, or not made, and there is a query about if that is the right call, or non-call, and the response is “it’s just a local match”. I’m on my twentieth year in this sport and I’ve heard that response more times than I can count and, as an instructor, have fielded questions about how to handle it even more often. A lot of this directly relates to so called “club culture” which has also been referred to as the “Good Old Boys” syndrome. So let’s dig in a bit and talk about what does and does not work.

Being a certified official and a competitor sometimes causes conflict. What if you are shooting a stage and do something you know should be a penalty or a disqualification but the RO doesn’t call it? What do you do? Do you keep quiet? Do you kindly educate the RO about the mistake and take the proper score?

Mondays are busy for NROI. There usually are multiple emails that start out with, “I shot a match this weekend and I am unsure the right call was made….” Sometimes the emails are from ROs who want to confirm they made the right call. But we also get a fair number of questions from competitors too.

I cannot really think of a sport wherein a coach does not have a place and, indeed, is not a critical element to overall success. It is the rare individual who manages to achieve any reasonable level of performance entirely on their own. “Coaching” in USPSA/SCSA comes in many flavors, let’s review them.

It is somewhat rare to have a student in a Level 1 Range Officer course who is an active competitor that hasn’t taken a turn “on the timer” working as an RO at their local club matches. I still remember, vividly, the first time someone handed me the timer (Hi Guy Neill!). I survived and so did everyone else. But I quickly realized I needed to get busy with learning what this whole RO thing was about. Pre-RO Seminar experience is quite valuable and greatly aids someone as a student in an RO class by giving them a solid point of reference to build from. However, it can be just as detrimental to their success as a student and RO. This is largely dependent upon the quality of coaching, intentional or otherwise, the RO-to-be gets at the local match level.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: