First USPSA Match Today

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Notepad is a good idea. Video is better. Both would be best. Maybe I need a notepad. Thanks for the idea.
 
I'm going to shoot in a USPSA match on Saturday that has about a 450 round course of fire in 8 stages. One of the stages will have two Texas Stars!

I'm thinking at this point that this will be my last match for the season. I may go to an IDPA match or two and shoot stock service revolver but that will be it until spring.
 
I'm going to shoot in a USPSA match on Saturday that has about a 450 round course of fire in 8 stages. One of the stages will have two Texas Stars!

I'm thinking at this point that this will be my last match for the season. I may go to an IDPA match or two and shoot stock service revolver but that will be it until spring.

In Pennsylvania?
 
We have one coming up on 11/6 in Morrisville VT as well, I had to miss last months so I'm really looking forward to it too.
I just started this year as well.
I agree on the dry fire practice range by Ben Stoeger. I set one up in my basement and it has moved me up a couple spots. My biggest problem on course has been forgetting my shooting and reloading plan and missing targets or just freezing up for a moment. This kind of practice helps a lot. Number one thing I've learned from this: if you get off plan, don't go freestyle, get back on plan even if it means backtracking a little.
A Grand Master at the last match gave me a good pointer as well:
A lot of our courses emphasize shooting while moving. This doesn't mean you should shoot them while running as fast as you can. You can move slowly with emphasis on keeping the sites aligned on target.
GM told me to practice walking past/ around one or two targets just focusing on holding sights on target. This means using a sliding gait that keeps your head and shoulders from moving up and down. You will see the difference if you try using different ways of walking while focusing on sights.

I will also throw my own personal advice in here. I'm not an shooting expert, but I have taught many different action sports and they all share a couple of points to focus on in training and improving.
1) keep knees and ankles flexed and loose. This improves balance and mobility as well as keeping upper body stable.
2) exaggerate the above in practice much more than you think you need to at first. Yes , you might feel silly, but no one is ever flexing knees and ankles as much as they think they are.

On Strategy:
Help with course set up and maybe even design a stage. You don't need to be an RO for this. The clubs are usually very happy to have your help and design ideas. Besides giving you and advance look at the stages , knowing what goes into stage design will give you a lot of insight into making a good game plan for them.

BTW I shoot limited major class with a Glock 35.
Gmpsvt.com
 
Oh and on the last match I did design a stage and it did have a Texas star! The stage next to it also had a spinning plate rack! 175 minimum round count for that match!
 
Thanks for the tips. I hope you didn't do anything really evil like put a no shoot in front of one of the plates on star. I woke up in a cold sweat one night dreaming about such a thing:)
 
I set it up so you could shoot at the star straight on with a no shoot blocking one plate on the side or you could move over and shoot through a port without the no shoot in the way.
I like the star!
 
No Texas star today, I was so disappointed I just won't be able to sleep tonight because they didn't have one today:evil::D
We did have some poppers dead square in front of no shoots, also had some small metal plates maybe 4X8 that they did not have in the first round those went well.
Had a great time, one major mental error :oops: went right by a target hiding behind two barrels on the last stage.:cuss: Ouch, and it was fairly close, easy shot.
Other than that things went better today, practicing shooting notebook page size targets at 20-25 yards seemed to help.
Got sidetracked with range clean up and missed final scores so I will have to wait until they are posted to see the results.

Think I'm hooked:D
 
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Glad you had fun!
Our course was very different from the last one I shot.
We had much less steel, but we did have the star on one stage again.
We had one stage with all cardboard with tons of no shoots and hard cover blackout. Lots of movement!
I think my performance reflected my recent practice. I have had zero ammo budget lately being out of work so I had no live fire practice at all since last match. I had a lot of misses on first shot on steel and misses and Charlie's on follow up shots on cardboard. I also had my first Glock mag issues, think I got some dirt in them. Not completely foolproof!
I have been doing a lot of practice on my dry fire range. I think this showed in much better movement through the stage and near perfect mag changes. I think I reacted well to the mag problems too. I was quick to rack the slide on failure to feed and remembered to drop out the bad mag.
Unfortunately, I did miss a target tucked behind a barrel too and it was also the stage I did best on marksmanship wise. Doh!
We also had a table start too. Never done that before, glad I practiced a little on that night before after I saw it during setup but I almost DQed when getting ready for the start. Make sure you are always waiting for instructions from the RO!

For those in Northeast, most clubs are done for the season but we go all winter!
Next match Dec 4! GMPSvt.com
 
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We had one stage where we started with the gun on top of a plastic barrel, different. Also had a closed door to go thru. I was a lot happier on how I did on all the steel targets this time around. (no more haunting me in my dreams!) None left standing. I had ordered another mag holder and 2 more mags after the first time and didn't use them in the 2nd match. (which is a good thing) :)The next one coming up for me is on the 4th as well. Can't wait. I need to continue to practice drawing and mag changes. I know there is some easy time to be gained there for me. Winter here is fairly mild compared to a lot of places. Snow once every 20 years in the valley, and below freezing is not real common. We do on occasion have some really thick fog but since the range is up in the foothills hopefully it won't be a factor. (other than getting to the range, when its bad you can't really see to drive but we all do anyway, got to get to work) So we will be going all winter as well.
Overall much more relaxed this time which helped. The RO laughed at me after one stage because I missed a plate 3 times then said :cuss::cuss::cuss:(not even thinking about what I said opps) then went ping ping ping and got that one and the all the next ones on the first shot. He said first time he ever saw someone cussing their gun help! and will have to give it a try since it seemed to work for me.
 
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Yeah, you're hooked!
I did a lot of swearing as well at missing steel. I was going too fast on first two stages. Too slow because of mag malfunctions on last two stages. Still need to calm down. Just have to get more match experience. I think next season I'm going to travel to other matches more so I can do more than one a month. I think our club is the only one around here running all winter.
 
No match results????? They posted USPSA in Sept the same day, and teh club posted IDPA results form the match today but no USPSA results.
:(
 
Sometimes takes a long time for them to post on the Uspsa website.
Hopefully your club is using digital scoring on tablets now. Results are at practiscore.com
It can sometimes be hard to find your clubs results depending on how your club officers enter the clubs name and title of the match. If your club has a website or Facebook page they usually post a link to it.
Also look on the Facebook page for your USPSA area, for example mine is USPSA area 7.
 
Hhmmm still no results. Match was the 6th.
Hope they didn't loos them or something.
 
Where are you looking for the results? What's the name of the club and date of the match?

It's not uncommon for the results to be posted but for something to happen with the name of the match, making it hard to find.
 
At the clubs site and the USPSA site. Emailed the and got a reply from the club, apparently the MD just hasn't posted them yet.
Normally the club has match results on their site the same day for IDPA, Steel Challenge and USPSA.
Hopefully soon, no big deal. I just thought I shot better than last time and was hoping my score reflected what I thought.:)
 
Ah results are on Practiscore. I was looking at the clubs site and the USPSA site I didn't realize they were on Practiscore.
I improved a bit, 49th out about 70 so there is still lots of room to improve. 117 A 3 B 23 C 11 M (the missed ones hurt) and 1 NS. My time was way slow (about 3 times a long as the winning time) so I need to work on speeding things up a bit and eliminate the misses.
Happy how things went considering it was only my second match.
 
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