A recent social media posting brought up the subject of why NROI seminars aren’t free. There are several reasons for that, and some actually are free–more on that later.
The simple fact is that it’s not free for instructors to travel around the country, and the USPSA budget has never been set up to provide for travel, lodging and meals for Range Officer or Chief Range Officer instruction. Since its inception in the late 80’s, the National Range Officers Institute has always charged a nominal fee to provide certification instruction, but was never intended to be a profit center for USPSA. In fact, it’s usually a break-even proposition on an annual basis. None of the instructors get paid to teach, but their expenses are covered by USPSA, which is what the fee is for. USPSA covers the travel expenses, and the host club is on the hook for lodging at a reasonable hotel, meals, and transportation if the instructor doesn’t drive.
The fee for a seminar that isn’t “local” (local seminars are when the instructor lives close by and can drive to and from the venue each day) is $800 minimum, with a 20 student minimum OR agreement from the hosting body to pay the minimum even if there aren’t 20 students. The fee goes up by $40 for each student attending over 20, so a 25 person seminar will price out at $1000, payable to USPSA. The instructor’s travel expenses–mileage, airfare, and parking are paid by that fee.
Since the host club will have to pay for lodging and meals (and transportation if they ask the instructor to rent a vehicle), they necessarily charge more than the minimum fee for the seminar. Sometimes that includes coffee and donuts in the morning, and lunch on the first day. When NROI hosts a seminar, the nominal fee is $75, which covers all of the expenses, coffee, donuts, and lunch included.
All of this information, including budgeting specifics, can be found in the Seminar Information link under the NROI tab at uspsa.org.
NROI does offer half-price seminars in conjunction with level III matches, usually Area Championships, and free, new-club seminars for new clubs completing a year of activity with a specified number of classifiers.
Why charge and why the year’s worth of activity? Why not just provide them for free? The simple answer, besides budgeting, is this: skin in the game. We’ve found that nominally free seminars and seminars where the host doesn’t require payment upon registration are poorly attended, with no-shows affecting the budget for the club. NROI-hosted seminars always require payment when registering as well. The same often goes for seminars where the club or section is picking up the tab and not charging the attendees. People find better things to do if they aren’t going to lose a little money by not attending.
We also get comments such as, “just do it online” or “have an online program and then have a CRO test them out”. Neither one works for us, simply because there is no substitute for in-person instruction. The live fire exercise, supervised and coached by an instructor is the single biggest “+5, highly recommend” comment that we get on the post-seminar evaluations. Online instruction, especially for a skill that requires observation and rules application is very often ineffective in producing competent trainees. At present there are 11 instructors, and sometimes we aren’t all rowing in the same direction on trivial details. We always try to work that out, but imagine if there were 200 CRO “trainers” to keep track of. This idea has been floated for many years, but has never held up to critical scrutiny. Instructors don’t just lecture, they coach, and they cover many of the nuances of the rules that might be overlooked or poorly explained if we did nothing but online instruction but we do some of that, too. In an effort to shorten the lecture portion of the seminar, we instituted a Learning Management System of slides, videos, and quizzes designed to teach some of the less critical aspects of the rules. Once certified, a range official at any level can gain SCSA endorsement, or Multigun endorsement or both, online, free of charge. We also do a fair amount of hybrid online/mentor training for Range Masters, but the final exam requires a trip to a Nationals event where the candidate will serve as a CRO or Assistant Range Master and then sit for a board review. There is a cost for this training as well, see “skin in the game” mentioned previously.
NROI also offers free continuing education items in the form of NROI Tips Videos, PractiScore training videos, and blog posts as well as the podcast, both of which attempt to clarify portions of the rules or range procedures that sometimes seem muddy.
Because of the rising cost of travel, and due to having to double up on instructors in 2023 in order to train the two new additions, we were considering raising the per-person price of the seminars, but found some other cost cutting measures that allowed us to forego increasing the registration fee, which hasn’t changed since the mid-90’s.
Do yourself and your club a favor and get certified. Your club will appreciate it and you’ll be a better competitor for it. Rules go both ways.