TCGC 9/07 Stage 3: "W Take 2"

On this stage, the competitor is truly challenged to rein in his urge to hose the stage and, instead, take a little more time to get a good sight picture and sight alignment.

The temptation is almost unbearable, and the risk is nearly unendurable.

The balance ... is a great challenge, and this may be one of the most challenging sneakiest stages of the match.

It's uncommon for such subtlety to be presented at a club match, and the credit goes to Match Director 'Norm the Ungrateful'. During the match I failed to take note of the stage designer credits, but I see the sly hand of Norm in this and many other stages in the match.

Norm tries to push the people who attend his matches. We've seen this before in the Columbia Cascade Section, and it has made better shooters of us no matter how we may whine and grumble.

A few years ago Tom Chambers served as Competition Director for CCS and most of the Points Matches were characterized by stages which emphasized accuracy and moving targets. The things we hated most, he emphasized. The result was that we were forced to learn the skills we had avoided. We didn't much like him for it, but we sure liked the results. When we had a Sectional match, we found that visitors against whom we competed had to work harder to beat us, and it didn't always turn out that way. When we attended major matches (a rarity in that then-insular environment), we finished much higher in the rolls than we had expected, because Tom taught us to shoot more accurately.

Now Norm is teaching us to think, and while his opportunities to influence the way we shoot may not impress us so emphatically, I am confident that we have as much to learn from Norm as we learned from Tom.

I note that this stage stage was the only one of the many penalty-target-infested stages on which I managed to avoid hitting the no-shoots. Would that I had been so cautious on the other stages.

Let's take a look at the video of one squad trying to shoot fast at tight, close targets:


This video is also available at Jerry the Geek's Video Shooting Gallery as 7t93.wmv