Free Advice

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?

[Read more…] about Lead by example

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.

[Read more…] about The rules are not just for ROs

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.

[Read more…] about Coaching: The Good and the Bad

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.

[Read more…] about Coaching the Nascent RO

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

[Read more…] about Stand Alone

Several times each month, usually on a Sunday or Monday, we get a question or two that starts along the lines of “This weekend at the match…” and, somewhat astonishingly, it is rarely mentioned that anyone pulled out a current copy of the rules and looked at what they had to say about the situation. Quite often someone who is considered to be “good with the rules” is mentioned as being consulted but, again, no one hauled out a book, electronic or otherwise.

[Read more…] about Look it Up, Don’t Overthink it

I saw this on a meme on social media and it sort of struck a chord.  I get a lot of questions describing a mistake some RO allegedly made at a match, or a declaration by a supposedly knowledgeable RO or local “rules guru” that is completely wrong and not found in the rules, but I have also been guilty of this very thing.  Case in point, I was asked recently about a situation where the RM did not disqualify a competitor for being more than 6 feet from a berm and uncasing a PCC.  The original sender wasn’t complaining as much as just wanting to know the possible reasons for allowing this.  I explained the rule, and then asked, “Who was this?  I will try to send him some information and educate him a little bit.”  Imagine my chagrin when the original sender said, “Um, well, it was you.”   Ope!  Once he said that, I remembered the match and circumstances, and I had to admit that yes, per a strict interpretation of the rules, it should have been a DQ, but at the time, he wasn’t pointing the gun at anybody, and was somewhere around 7 feet from the berm or so, with the gun in a cart.  And, remembering that match, I was probably distracted by something else at the time.  All things considered, it seemed like the right call, and I can’t say I wouldn’t do it exactly the same way again, but I got a little lesson in humility and I haven’t forgotten it. 

[Read more…] about Be Teachable – You’re Not Always Right