My first pistol match

Yesterday I bit the bullet and entered a USPSA club match.  I've had exactly two practice sessions with the club and I was hooked.

Here is the blow by blow:


First stage.  This stage was called confusion and I wish that I could have come at it a little later in the day.  From the start box there were two stacked targets on the right and two side by side targets on the left.  When that buzzer went off I was so hopped up I managed to miss one target completely and Alpha/Charlie the other three.  After the first two you run through a doorway and there are four more targets, two left, two right.  Somewhere in that group you've got to do a mag change.  I should have shot left first, then it's easy to do a safe mag change when switching to the right hand targets.  I failed at that and almost got a DQ for muzzle breaking the 180.  Then you procede through another doorway and engage three more targets, two left, one right.  I did ok on these and then it was time for another mag change.  Then there are four steel targets to shoot through a low porthole.  I took two shots on each before I got them all down.  The second row of targets were all A/C while the three before the steel were A/D, A/A, and A/C.  Third row were all C/C  An absolutely dismal performance.

Second stage.  This stage started in a chair facing a porthole with three targets.  I did really well on these getting A/A on all three.  Then there were two more groups of three targets that I believe were all A/C and then three steel targets that had to be engaged through the porthole.  I missed the steel quite a bit and that hurt my time as well.  I went slower on this round but those C hits really hurt.  Some people may be able to miss fast enough to win this game, but I can't.  The range officer warned me that I had my finger in the trigger guard during my mag changes.  This is a first for me.  I'm usually very careful about that but when concentrating on everything else it appears that I slipped.

Third stage.  Steel Qualifier.  With only six targets 36 feet away, you'd think this one would be easy.  So they but a board right in front of you and make you shoot around it.  When I practiced this, I placed one foot on each fault line and used that extra wide stance to get low and lean around the barrier.  When I shot it for real, I tried a left foot back stance.  I really had to crane around to shoot at the targets and it took me twelve rounds to put those six targets down.  After the stage, the range officer told me that I was missing left.  That was a real eye opener two me as I though I was missing high.  On further examination my middle finger was tightening with my trigger finger pulling the gun to the left.  *Sigh* Yet another thing to work on.

Fourth stage.  A texas star.  Hunt youtube if you want to see what this is.  I did pretty well on this stage making my goal of under one minute.  Of course par time would be 12 seconds so you know what my score was like.

Fifth stage.  I'd gotten another warning about my trigger finger so the only thing I worked on during this stage was trigger finger placement.  I ran it really slow and got some awesome hits through out the stage.

Moral of the story?  Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.  If I'd fired all my stages like the last one, I would have finished much higher in the standings.  I'll have to remember to come read this before my next match.