This weekend I attended a USPSA match at the Dundee club. The weather was good, the stage designs were good, the people with whom I was privileged to shoot ("my squad", not to be to ego-centric) were truly excellent and a lot of fun.
This match may serve as one of the halcyon times of club shooting, because all elements of weather, shooting challenge and shooting companions combined to make the day a memorable experience. I've shot a few Major Matches in my time, and these are notionally the epitome of competition shooting.
In the actual event, though, it's difficult to beat a good club match shared with your friends. The only thing that would have improved the day would be if SWMBO had felt well enough to join me at the match.
MD Paul and RM (and probable designer of most of the stages, plus the guy who probably set the stages up and tore the down) "Evil Bill" are the under-appreciated authors of this Excellent Adventure. In a reminiscent moment today, the day after the match, I relived the history of IPSC/USPSA matches in the Columbia Cascade Section.
Competition History within Local Clubs:
First there was Tri-County Gun Club (TCGC), where I took a class in "New Shooter Certification" in 1983. There was no other local club (to my knowledge) hosting this kind of Practical Pistol shooting in the area, at the time. This formed my standard of future evaluations. TCGC offered two matches a month: the second Saturday and the third Sunday of the month, and more often than not the stage designs were identical on both match days. The matches were an opportunity to shoot a pistol which (if your situation was similar to mine) was rarely used for any more challenging purpose than shooting at tin cans.
A few years after I started shooting regularly at TCGC, I became aware that the Albany Rifle & Pistol Club (ARPC) was sponsoring IPSC matches. I lived in Portland at the time, and the drive the ARPC was something of an imposition. Also, the leadership at the club was, while determined, not endowed with Leadership Potential. The people who accepted a leadership position found it difficult to recruit help from the participants, and consequently found themselves bound to design six stages a month, and usually they set them up without any help in the last morning moments on Match Day. The running joke was the "Competition starts at 9am" meant ""9:30 if you're lucky, more likely 10am."
But it was no joke.
This situation rapidly led to burnout of the organizers, and their best response to an obvious need to recruit more help was to antagonize the few people who chose to participate. I finally resolved to "never again to shoot a match at ARPC", and with few exceptions followed this determination for several years. Fortunately, several years ago ARPC found members willing to accept responsibility for organizing IPSC matches, and (as TCGC discovered), this discipline is one of the most consistent sources of income in the history of the club.
Enter the Madmen of Dundee: The Crocs
Somewhere between the peak of TCGC and the nadir of ARPC, a few bold adventurers at The Chealem Valley Shooting Club (CVSC), always and ever known as "Dundee" (after the name of the nearest town), decided that they could join their efforts to present a program of IPSC-type matches at their local club ... which is accessed via a gate in the fence surrounding "Crabtree Park" (yes, it's a park near Dundee, Oregon, and sited in the middle of Wine Country North in Oregon). The range was most often used by hunters who were sighting in their rifles before hunting season, but it was an established club with berms, a few bays, and an absolute minimum of facilities. (They had to build a 'stats shack', the computers were laptops powered by automobile batteries, and there were only four 'bays'.)
The stage design philosophy of CVSC was, essentially, "If it bleeds, it leads". There were only a few steel targets available, which represents perhaps $1,000 investment (I'm guessing) and the very first investment was to buy the most difficult targets available ... "droppers" (disappearing targets, which were powered by gravity and were usually set up as "Disappearing Targets", and "Bobbers", which wig-wagged and often were hidden by vision barriers or no-shoot 'targets'.
The stage designs represented a new philosophy: if you expect static targets without penalties for missed shots, you were due to be surprised and disappointed at a Dundee match. Moving targets were the rule rather than the exception, and any Pepper Popper on the stage was likely to activate a moving target ... as the club evolved, they played with stage designs which placed moving targets which could not be engaged from the same position where the activating Pepper Popper could be engaged.
Dundee imagined, and created, stage challenges which were not generally available anywhere else in the world. This was not the exceptional match; this was every match.
The Mad Men of Dundee have mellowed a bit over the years, but the challenges continue. They were not the first local club to feature the Texas Star in club competition, but they were the first to offer difficult variations (see Evil Bill and the Evil Oregon Star when searching this website).
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Back to this particular Dundee match.
Dundee continues to evolve its stage designs, and this match is typical. Most stages revealed all targets from the starting position, but even the Classifier, "3 V", asked you to emphasize accuracy over speed by shooting at cardboard targets largely covered by "No-Shoot" penalty targets.
But most of the stages pushed movement and speed, with a lot of steel targets and most of them requiring the competitor to move several times (or continuously ... depending on your ability to shoot on the move) to engage targets.
Better, there was a "Jungle Run" stage, with ten Turtle-Targets and three US Poppers hidden in a forest of ferns and trees.
I took a lot of videos of the match, although I didn't end up with usable videos of all of the stages.
The people on the squad all worked hard, so the match went quickly. In fact, I was the 'laziest' member of the squad, because I was filming as much of it as I could. I spent some time taping, more time RO-ing, and my greatest regret is that I didn't film Iain and Judith the last stage because these "New Chums" are so eminently photogenic while they shoot a stage. But I got at least one one 'typical' stage for each, where Iaian leaps like a frog from one shooting position to the next and Judith extends herself as if an epee-wielding fencer to pierce a target.
And Jerry and Catherine H. demonstrate their careful approach to stages. Brent leaves a trail of 8-round magazines everywhere he goes as he competes in the difficult Single-Stack division. Rich W. yells "Yay-Hoo!" on the Jungle run, and I don't capture it, but I get a wide variation on the theme as other squad members shoot the green stage.
Norm storms every stage he encounters, until he is confronted by the Jam From Heck when a nickle-plated case reverses itself during ejection and jams between the breech and the open-gun Scope Mount ... at 5.99 seconds into the stage, and takes 39.66 seconds to clear the jam to continue by engaging the last 12 Steel Targets for a final stage time of 52.06 on Stage 1. (This so inspired Master-Class shooter Norm that he, after winning his first stage .. Stage 6 ... just relaxed and treated the entire match as nothing more than a lark to be enjoyed for its own sake. It's hard not to like a tough competitor like Norm, when he is so willing to just ignore defeat in favor of having a good time at the match. No tantrums, no ego moments ... just a guy who understands the reason we're spending our Saturday in a Rock Quarry, and gets all the joy available from the exercise.)
I have a lot of pictures, and I have posted them on Jerry the Geek's Video Shooting Gallery tonight.
I had a great time, and some of my stages weren't even disasters. Who could ask for more?
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