For this Question of the Month we looked at a situation that might arise during a SCSA match. On the second string of a stage at a SCSA match, a competitor’s gun breaks and the string is scored as shot. The competitor asks to complete the remaining strings after repairing the gun. The gun ends up not being fixable and the competitor does not have a back-up gun and cannot complete the match. How are the remaining strings scored?
For this specific question, the correct answer is the remaining un-shot strings are recorded as missed stop plates (30 second maximum time for each un-shot string).
This question actually led to a month of discussion among the RMIs, Zack Jones, and the SCSA Committee to determine the correct way to handle this. After some testing in PractiScore, it was determined in this situation where the competitor had 2 strings that were already scored, and can’t complete rest of the strings, then the rest of the strings will be marked as 30 seconds (missed stop plate). The reason is because when we marked the competitor as DNF in PractiScore, then all string times are eliminated instead of reporting the accurate score for that stage. DNF also shows the competitor as not shooting the stage at all and will affect their overall standings because it shows that stage not completed. If this happened on the last stage of the match, then the competitor could still be considered for awards because all stages were completed.
If there is a situation where the competitor does not shoot that stage at all, then the DNF button is appropriate to use because there was no attempt at the stage at all. So in the above situation, if the competitor had the gun break on the second stage and then could not continue for rest of the match, there would be scores for the first 2 stages and DNFs for rest of the match. PractiScore then shows the competitor having incomplete stages and places the competitor at the bottom of the results.
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