Stage Review

I haven't had a chance to see myself shoot a stage in a match for a while. I've not been capturing videos with my hatcam or worrying about asking someone else to hold a camera while I shot. I've just been shooting and not trying to worry about much else. So when I found out that someone else caught me shooting stage #3 at the match this past Saturday I thought I would analyze my performance.



The first thing to say is that this was the first stage of the match for me.  The first stage is something of a warm-up stage for me.  I don't want to push myself but be deliberate and get my hits.

It looks like I started off pretty well.  I got my pistol and secured the extra magazine in my mag pouch without any issues.  I might have gotten to the first shooting position a little faster, but when I got there I had my right foot planted and so had a good solid position to engage the targets from cover.

When I moved from the first to the second shooting position I performed a reload with retention, but it was slow.  I mean: coordinating the moving, the retention of my reload, and the seating of the new magazine was a bit awkward and therefore too slow.  I need to work on moving and reloading with retention.  I had the same problem on Stage #1 in this match.  (Just for the record, I might have gotten by with no reload since there were only 11 shots required for this stage.   But if I would have missed the steel popper from the prone position, I would not have been able to engage the "clam shell" target effectively because I would have only had one round left.  I would have had to reload from the prone position, and that's not good.)

Once I got to the second shooting position, I engaged the third target fine, but then pulled the last shoot on the 4th target.  I was anticipating the move.

I see no issues with my going prone.  I knocked the popper down with one shot and put two rounds (a zero and -1) on the rising clamshell target quickly before it was covered by the non-shoot.

Overall, I thought this was a sluggish performance (raw time = 16.89 secs).  But it was my first stage and I'm trying to slow down and get my bearings on that first stage these days.  I scored one down on each target except for the one I pulled the shot on and got a miss.  Well, I just checked the stage details and see that I wasn't as sluggish as I thought.  My raw time was actually the second fastest of the 85 shooters.  But I look at the video and know that I could have torn it up.  I need to work on efficiency and speed between the shooting positions.