Do Better!

At the last two Action Pistol Matches I shot, I made some dumb mistakes. In the hopes of not making them again, I thought I’d share.

Stage one for me the other day was the plates. It was at my home range and so I assumed I knew what the deal was. Unfortunately, I had only ever shot the local monthly matches, never a bigger regional match. Instead of the typical shot timer we use at the monthly matches, this crazy siren noise is used to start. I drew and started shooting, but as I went to plate number two, I realized that I was the only one shooting. I thought I had drawn early and DQ’d myself, so I started to move my head and gun off the target as I was breaking the shot. The shot went wide and I returned to a ready position while I looked around. Turned out everyone was just then starting to shoot, so I pressed out and finished the plate rack.

Mistake number one was not knowing what the start signal was. In this case, I should have asked the RO. Had I not been in the first relay of the first stage, I could have watched the people shooting before me. Always a good idea to do so. Mistake number two was breaking my concentration and position prematurely and missing a plate. I shot 49 of the 50 plates that day, and a miss at 10 yards is hard to take when I could have had a perfect score on the stage.

The day before that at a different range but also on plates, I should have waited till later in the morning to shoot the stage as the sun was in our eyes. The 10-yard line was shaded, but the other lines were not, so I had to adjust my hat fairly precisely to see my dot while blocking the sun. At the 25-yard line, my hat slipped down and covered up my glasses. I had to break my shooting position, shove the hat back, and then shoot really fast to make up for the lost time. I made it with no misses, but it was not a desirable situation to be in. See the video below. The guys next to me were on their third plate by the time I got my hat sorted out and I had to push to make the time. I’m shooting on the third rack from the left.

Hopefully, I have learned my lesson in this area, and will not make the same dumb mistakes next time. We have a few other competitions before the next Action Pistol match, including Steel Challenge and the first RANK national championship, so I will still have plenty of opportunities to make more mistakes.

BTW, my IT department tells me that we have now gotten to 1000 followers on Instagram. Thank you guys!

4 comments

  1. Ok, I’ll bite – what’s this RANK National Championship of which you speak? Google let me down. Kept taking me to college football.

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