IDPA Nationals – stage performance analysis Part 1

Thanks to IDPA’s new online scoring system, I can go back and take a look at all the stages from the 2013 Nationals and see where I finished in my division regardless of classification. For various reasons, IDPA’s SSR division is actually pretty tough, this year there were a total of 9 DMs or MA class shooters in the division, plus 5 Experts and 9 combined Sharpshooters and Marksmen. This post serves as a match recap, where I’ll look at each stage, my score/points down, and what I could have done better. All “places” in this post are overall, classifications have been eliminated for the purpose of this discussion. You can see the full match results here.

Stage 1
Score: 23.29, 8 points down
Raw time: 19.29
Place: 11th

Analysis: Stage 1 did not go well for me. With a fairly slow raw time at 19.29, a miss on the far target just added insult to injury. To close the stage out, I also took an extra un-needed make-up shot, adding another half second easily to my time. This was my 2nd to last stage on the 2nd day of shooting.

Tips for improvement: Trust my front sight and trigger pull. For whatever reason, I was very slow with my trigger pull on this stage, despite having made tighter shots earlier in the match with a much quicker trigger pull.

Stage 2
Score: 22.95, 1 point down, 1 no-shoot
Raw time: 17.45
Place: 12th

Analysis: I actually turned in a fairly competitive raw time on this stage, and if I hadn’t winged that no-shoot, I’d have finished 6th overall.

Tips for improvement: Don’t shoot no-shoots. This one I can just chalk up to “stuff happens sometimes” and move on.

Stage 3
Score: 16.46, down 4
Raw time: 14.46
Place: 4th

Analysis: My last stage of the match, and after a pretty poor day of shooting on day 2, I finally pulled it all together when it was too late to do me any good. You can actually see video of my solid run here.

Tips for improvement: I gave away probably a 1.0-1.5 seconds in two areas, my draw and coming up to the first target after the reload. My draw was very slow because I was trying to avoid sweeping my leg, and the target acquisition after the reload is a little slow as well.

Stage 4
Score: 28.99, down 9
Raw time: 24.49
Place: 8th

Analysis: my first stage of the match, and I was pretty cautious and slow. My raw time would have been reasonable, but one target I was score with a down zero and a miss, which I still believe was two down zero shots. Oh well. I always struggle on the first stage, and I usually shoot it in “survival” mode, trying to not lose the match.

Tips for improvement: I really need to work on attacking stages right out of the gate. Shooting in survival mode is fine if I don’t want to win anything, so I need to work on mental conditioning to help get me ready to be more aggressive on the initial stages.

Tomorrow I’ll look at stages 5-9, and I’ll have video as well.