So I've never shot at the Cherokee Gun Club (Gainesville, Ga) and this past Saturday was their scheduled IPSC match. Easy stages, they said in an email, not a lot or running or physical stuff, because of the heat. Stages will go quickly and we'll get out of there early. It's 65 miles, but I thought this would be a good chance to see this club.
Well, everybody including Team Glock had the same idea. Over 100 of us showed up! I was feeling like a pretty small fish in a rather large pond. I learned a lot about "gaming" the system, too.
First who was I rubbing shoulders with? Well here are the GM, M and A class shooters, for starters.
Sevigny, Dave GM Limited10
Lund, Erik GM Limited
Munier, William GM Production
Litt, Tod GM Production
Eusebio, KC GM Open
Nied, Larry M Open
Rogers, Randi M Production
Arrowood,Randy M Limited10
Romero, Rob M Single
Penrod, Devon M Limited
Gingco, Gerard M Production
Koon, Jason M Production
Oliver, Peter A Open
Abbate,Jessica A Open
Cochran, Kaci A Open
Ellington, Brian A Production
Marcellino, Tony A Single
Wasielewski, M A Open
Well, maybe I wish I could rub shoulders with a couple of them. Several local competitors, but you recognize some of the names as "big time" shooters.
Now this is a nice facility and the club members work very hard to put on a fine match. Some stages did require a bit of thinking but were basic in design while at the same time requiring a good combination of speed and accuracy. They do this other neat thing. They drew 5 names out of the hat and those people got $25 cash. Paid for the entry fee and gas money.
The problem came about in squading. It was a big white board that you just signed your name on. When I got there I thought I'd do the gentlemanly thing and sign into the squad with the least names. Well this turned out to be their big bugaboo. No one monitored the squad signup so some squads had only 13 and others over 20. Created some bottle necks. (I also think that if your squad isn't shooting you need to stay out of the other squad's range and out of their way, until they're finished.)
I also understand now why my squad had so few people signed up initially. My squad started with the qualifier stage and no one wanted to shoot the qualifier cold. Ah - ha. Lesson learned.
First shot didn't get off until after 10am and it took about an 75 minutes for my squad to complete the first stage. By the third stage all the other squads were starting to stack up behind the largest squad. To hurry things along the ROs were taking some short cuts in scoring. On one stage I barely was able to get downrange before they had my targets pasted. Not that anybody did anything wrong or cheated me out of any points, but.......well it wasn't as fun as it could be. My calculations were that it would be after 5pm before we finished. I had only planned on staying till 2pm. So I dropped out after 3 stages. No regrets.
THE BEST STAGE: I liked it. A lot of people went to the Range Master before the match started to complain. I think they were upset because you couldn't double tap. Here's how it went. 4 targets downrange at 25yds, 6 targets on each side from 5 yds to 20 yds (forming a U shaped set of targets). A total of 16 targets. 4 shooting positions each putting you progressively down range and putting some targets behind you. No all targets were visible from all positions. You fired 8 and only 8 shots from each position and then you had to move to another position and reload. You could only fire one shot per target from any one shooting position. Score best two shots per target. Had to think on that one and remember which targets already had one hole and which had none.
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Topic: Black Saturday.....more lessons from competition. (Read 2158 times)