Congratulations! Your club has decided to hold a major match and lucky you gets to be the Match Director. That will teach you to miss important meetings…right? In all seriousness, thank you for stepping up. Major matches don’t happen without a lot of good people and one of the first of those to be appointed is the Match Director or “MD”.
Somewhere along the line someone is going to mention that you need to submit something called “Form C” to USPSA/NROI. Yes, there used to be a Form A and a Form B but we don’t really use those anymore. So, where do you get this “Form C” and what do you do with it, what does it does do for you?
The first answer is easy. https://uspsa.org/formc See, told you that was easy.
What does Form C do for you? That’s slightly more complicated. Form C is the form that must be submitted to become a Sanctioned USPSA Major Match. Submitting this gets your match on the USPSA Match Calendar (with “pending” status) which helps get your match out there for folks to consider attending. It also starts the sanctioning process with NROI.
The sanctioning process with NROI requires you to list the MD (probably yourself) and the Range Master (RM) you intend to use.
Keep in mind that the RM can’t just be any person willing to do the job. For Level II (generally Sectional and State) matches if your RM is not a certified NROI Range Master they will need to be approved by NROI and your Area Director. For Level III matches, your RM must be a certified NROI RM. Helpful hint here…ask the person you intend to be your RM if they will do the job and have room for you on the calendar. It does happen now and then that an RM is listed and hasn’t been informed ahead of time. This can be humorous (panicked phone calls to HQ “How do we get _____ to be our RM since we listed him and forgot to tell him?”) or down right dangerous for your match when you suddenly have no RM.
As a general rule of thumb, a match with up to twelve stages can get by with a single RM as long as all the stages are geographically located near each other. Over twelve stages, or with longer distances to cover, consider a second RM, or more as necessary. Match flow can depend on the RM(s) answering calls rapidly. If there is a lot of distance to cover then time is burning and your match flow goes out the window.
Non-NROI certified RMs can be used for Level II matches, with approval as mentioned above. These folks are often CROs who are looking toward the Range Master program and looking to get some hands on experience as an RM above the local level. A big factor in gaining NROI and AD approval will be their online work record (NROI Work Record visible on Classification Record for certified range officials). If it is blank, and no one in NROI knows them, they may not get approved. We just don’t hand the keys to the RM-mobile to just anyone. We need to know that they will enforce the rules and do so correctly. Thus, it is recommended that you consider your choice of RM carefully. If you need help finding an RM and you want a NROI certified RM, reach out to NROI and we can put the word out to the certified RMs and quite likely find someone to help you out.
Another part of the sanctioning process is submitting stage designs for approval. These are uploaded into your Form C and NROI staff review them. Typically this will be DNROI, one of the ADNROIs, or one of the RM Instructors. It may even get kicked down to your RM if they are NROI Certified as an RM. As a bare minimum, we are going to want Overhead views of your stages as well as the more typical stage view and Stage Description sheet. A pencil drawing on blue line graph paper shot with a flip phone camera in poor light isn’t going to get you the approval you need. The drawings need to be of high enough quality that we can tell what you are trying to do with your stages. Keep in mind that just because we approve your drawing doesn’t mean your stage will still be legal when it is set up. The more room for interpretation there is in your drawing the higher the likelihood that your stage will have issues once set up. Some clubs take this to an extreme and have surveyed their bays down to fractions of inches and build their stage designs in SketchUp to the bay dimensions. That leaves precious little room for interpretation but even these stages can run into trouble translating from paper to dirt.
It is a VERY good idea to get your stages to your match RM(s) well ahead of the stage submittal deadline. Oh…you didn’t read Appendix A1 about deadlines? Oops. Level II matches need to have stages in one month ahead of the match and Level III matches need to have them in two months ahead. I always recommend you get them to your RM at least two weeks before the deadline. Earlier is always better. A thorough review by your RM(s) ahead of submission generally makes the review process go rapidly.
Once everything is taken care of and your stages begin the review process you are likely to be contacted by the reviewer if there are any questions or concerns about your stages. Keep in mind that the calendar is flying by so get answers back to these questions rapidly. Once the reviewer is satisfied that your stages will comply with the rules they will approve your match and your status on the calendar will change from “Pending” to “Approved”. Depending on who is doing the review this can happen almost instantly to a couple days down the road…so don’t panic if it doesn’t change the instant you get the email from the reviewer approving your match.
So that’s Form C in a nutshell. Not too bad, right? As always, if you have questions about Form C, the stage approval process or just about anything else match related don’t hesitate to contact NROI for help or clarification.