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!
Ok, I’ll bite – what’s this RANK National Championship of which you speak? Google let me down. Kept taking me to college football.
They call it RANK or Prairiefire, not sure which is which.
https://www.prairiefire.com/
Looks interesting. I’ll have to see if there are any matches near me.
It is harder than I would have thought, lol. Enjoy it!