Last Friday, it was announced that effective immediately, membership dues in USPSA would be increasing between 50% and 120% depending on the type of membership. This has caused a lot of discussion within the membership. Below is my letter to the board, submitted today via email. Members of the Board, Like many members of USPSA, I was unpleasantly surprised last Friday to read the announcement in the board minutes that annual dues were increasing by more than half, effective immediately. Rumors have been swirling for months that an increase might be coming, but to have it become reality effecti ..read more

What follows is an email exchange I had with Troy McManus, DNROI, ahead of the 2022 Carolina Classic. I don’t want to be accused of taking quotes out of context, so I’m publishing the entire exchange here for anyone interested to read and decide. The first email was sent in my best hail-mary attempt to find a loophole around the rule requiring that “every” competitor’s ammo be checked via chrono. In practice, this mandatory requirement results in no time to for random re-sampling, thus making–in my opinion–chrono easy to game, if someone were so inclined. Our original intent of this was to spe ..read more

USPSA as it is now is not really set up to be a spectator sport, and would need some significant changes to be close to as TV-friendly as something like basketball or football. That said, if we are doing the work to run a livestream of shooters from Nationals, and people are willing to watch it, what can we do to make it as good as possible? Last fall, during the Carry Optics Nationals, I was watching the YouTube livestream. It was boring, with brief moments of interesting content. I got to thinking what might make it better. With no preparation, I just started an OBS stream and decided to win ..read more

This was my first time back to True North in Oxford since last August, and the match was true to their usual style: almost every target partialed, tight shooting positions, and a seated start in the shoot house. I honestly wonder what the goal of such difficult target presentations is, since it definitely does not make the match a crowd pleaser, and attendance is usually pretty sparse. (A lot of folks were scared off by the threat of rain during the match and there were only 18 shooters split between two squads.) I ran “Production Optics” style, shooting my Stock 2 with Sig dot on it, but with ..read more

I’ve been trying to convince people that staff reset is the way to run major USPSA matches for a while now. The match benefits from being able to get more shooters through the stage in the same amount of time. The ROs benefit from having a consistent reset process that reduces reshoots and questionable rules calls (“Was that hole pasted?”). The shooters benefit by being able to just focus on their shooting and have confidence that the score they got is the score they shot. And around here, the momentum is growing. The North Carolina Section match has been staff reset at least since 2013, when ..read more

Going into this match, my expectations were pretty low. Despite the weather turning nice recently, I had been sidelined from practicing or dry firing by a hand injury until about two weeks before the match. That said, in retrospect, I had the advantage of not having really changed my gear setup in years, so everything was very familiar. Boring does occasionally have its upsides. Going into the match, I was particularly worried about fumbling mags on reloads from further back on the belt, but that ended up being a non-issue. The one new piece of gear for this match was a Vice holster (yes, spel ..read more

This month, I decided to take out the Stock 2 with the red dot on an EGW plate and shoot a match with it. It’d been running well in practice, and I thought it would be interesting to take it to a pretty tough local match. As I discuss at the end of the match video, I decided to shoot it with 15 round magazines, following on from last month’s match in “Production 15” (aka IPSC Production). In part because I was curious: there’s a lot of discussion about what the future of the US Carry Optics division should be, and I was curious to see in a match context what the difference between 15 and 23 r ..read more

Now that the NC Section is done, I got to picking up my Tanfoglio Stock 2s that had been gathering dust while I spent some time with the Glock 17 in Carry Optics. (Don’t worry, I have a post coming with my thoughts on the experience and how it changed my game even coming back to the iron sight guns.) You might think I was itching to go back to the heavy steel guns after the punishing 9mm recoil in a twenty-something ounce Glock. But the reality is, the main thing I noticed coming back was just how much more substantial the Tanfos felt in hand. It’s a totaly subjective thing, but the Glock just ..read more

Yesterday, I made a mistake. As I was going through my CRO exam, a question came up about a rule in the rulebook I’d not seen before: 7.1.8 Director NROI(“DNROI”) – While serving at a match as a member of the staff carries the same overall authority as the Match Director and Range Master. The DNROI while on staff will be there to assist the Match Director and Range Master in all endeavors to keep things running smoothly and help to make the match a success. I thought this was a particularly strange and non-sensical rule. In what scenario would DNROI be working a match as staff, but not an RM ..read more

The North Carolina Section match is over, and once again it went as well as it could. All the usual stuff like walking the prize table, staff reset, and five minute walkthroughs made this one of the best matches of the year for competitors. This is the third year that Steph has been the Section Coordinator and the process of planning and executing the match gets smoother every year. Setup Thursday was the build day, and it was mostly uneventful. When I was helping with setting up Stage 4, which was my design, the setup we’d used at a club match for the hiding double-plate swinger before activa ..read more