M.I.S.S. Match 10/16/13

M.I.S.S. Match 10/16/13

It’s an advantage to help set-up the night before a match. One of the better lessons I learned this summer is to be prepared for each and every stage, walk it, memorize it, and execute your plan.  One of the earlier criticisms someone made, when I suspect they had too many easy to point our flaws that might hurt my feelings was that I rarely had a plan, and I needed to work on my prep. When I was getting started, I admit, that was 100% accurate, my thoughts were to be safe, and just “shoot stuff”, I ate standing reloads, I took horrible paths, and I did most of it on the fly. If there is a recipe to not succeed, that definitely is it.

In my video’s, I can see where I started to transition to an analytical mode, and how my stage approach started to change. These days, I feel like I walk thru enough to have my plan in place, and I go with it, it’s almost memory when I’m shooting. There is no “alternate plan in case I miss”. Sure, I can plot better ways to approach arrays, and to leave an array, and sometimes I still need help finding the best way to approach a stage, but this is a part of my game that is evolving.

The Wisconsin Sectional Match (which video is conspicuously absent) was a case in point of why it’s important to go early, walk stages, and be prepared. If you are going to spend time and money on a major match, it really does behoove you to arrive early, walk stages, and get a preliminary game plan in place. Make sure what you saw on paper looks the same, and that there are no surprises to be had. In the last six months, no match set me back more than the Wisconsin Sectional.  I’m just going to say that there were a lot of things that went wrong for me, but one thing that was in my power to have go right, I blew by not being as prepared as I should have been.

Last night at M.I.S.S. I opened on a pretty fun stage, and while setting up the night before, I had two or three ideas on how I could shoot the stage. Kozy made a suggestion, and I was all over it, it was different than I had come up with, but it helped save me a reload. Because I was deliberately slow from draw to first shot, my time was nowhere near what it could have been, so my one less reload advantage was negated. I did however learn an important lesson, and that’s that sometimes I need to take a step back to really see the whole picture. When I finished my round, it was apparent to the Range Officer that I’d been talking to Kozy, because he even commented on what a good plan that was, and that is how he was going to shoot it.  Too much feedback can be bad, but not seeing the whole picture can also not be a negative.

I had two real goals last night, and with Les busy at Production Nationals, the scores won’t be uploaded until next week, so I won’t know until then how many points I shot. I do know that I had zero mikes, zero deltas, 15 C’s, 2 B’s, and all the rest Alpha’s. That’s still not the accuracy that I want, I’d like to cut the C’s in half, but zero mikes and deltas is progress.

The other goal that I had was running a “B” level classifier, and I thought it would be a gimmie, and it was not. My first run I ended up around a 48% score, but since we had time waiting for the other squad to flip stages, a couple of us paid our extra money for submission, and did a re-shoot. This time I ended up with a hit-factor of 5.062, which was a 59.737% run, or about .26 short of a “B” run.  Don’t misunderstand me, that’s progress, but during that run I had 3 misses on steel, and if I had one less miss, I’d have had my 60%, if I had run it clean, I’d have been in around a 70%, which is what I was aiming for. Consider a little confidence built.

As a side note, not naming any names, I had a conversation today with a friend, and I mentioned how since this was the 2^nd match of the fall season, it was nice to see some old faces I had not seen all summer at matches. I also noted that last spring I thought quite a few of them were excellent shooters, and shot at a classification lower than their ability. Oh, how a summer has changed me. Today I noted that as I watched last night, I realized that they were not as good as I’d thought; I was able to be objective, and see things that they were doing wrong. It’s not a sense of cockiness, but it’s a sense of objectiveness, and perhaps that I’m finally starting to see, and more importantly gain some understanding of the sport, which can only help me learn and improve my own game.