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 HouseRO Best Practices
Perf to Perf vs. Edge to Perf
It used to be that all ROs were taught to align targets perf to perf. In fact many of the Classifiers are that way and still need to be setup that way, but now we are encouraging ROs to align edge to perf.
[Read more…] about Perf to Perf vs. Edge to PerfMind Your Targets
Target changes are a part of match life for ROs, but if the wrong target is used during the change-out, it can have major consequences. One wrong target can lead to squads needing to reshoot the stage, or even a stage getting tossed. Let’s talk about how to avoid this.
[Read more…] about Mind Your TargetsLet’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 StageIt takes two to RO
Like the tango, running a competitor through a course of fire takes two Range Officers who work as a team. This is something we stress repeatedly in the RO seminar, so let’s look at the reasons why.
[Read more…] about It takes two to ROOn 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 Human