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Some guidelines for stage
directors
Designing and building a USPSA stage isn't
especially hard, but it may be that some folks interested in trying it
might be intimidated by the USPSA and club rules that control the possible
setups. I'd like to set out a few of the basic concepts from the
Club's point of view and combine that with basic USPSA rules design.
First of all, the USPSA pistol rulebook is available online in an
indexed pdf file
here . A good reading of the first chapter, "Course Design"
will spell out the various types of courses and their requirements.
USPSA is certainly one of the leaders in action pistol rulemaking and
safety procedures. This is reflected in the size and depth of the
rulebooks themselves. But for the purpose of getting good stages set
up and run at NPCCC, touching on some of the basics will go a long way
towards getting a good start.
Safety as the first design element
The first and most important element of making stages is safety. A
design should anticipate not only what the designer thinks is going to
happen, but what can happen, especially if things have a chance of getting
unpredictable. There's no such thing as perfect safety design, of
course, since an unsafe action by a participant can undo the best of
design intentions, but we still work on coming closer to perfection.
The basic element, though, is putting the shooter constantly in a
position where his or her fire will not be a danger to anyone near or far.
Courses should not allow a shooter to get ahead or behind the thinking
curve so that they could inadvertantly swing the muzzle out of the 180
degree downrange arc. A situation where a shooter is running and
then may find a target back uprange and try a shot without fully realizing
that the muzzle is outside the 180 should be avoided. Not that
design can prevent all or even most 180 violations, but such problems can be reduced by
building in a flow of action that avoids them in the first place.
A more subtle element is keeping the design open and free-flowing enough
to allow the competitor and range officer both to have sufficient room to
operate, without bumping into the course props or one another.
Another prime safety concern is hard-surface bounceback. Steel
poppers are common targets in action pistol, and any hard object,
including even target stands and prop components, can allow a bounceback.
USPSA rules call for a minimum distance of 23 feet for steel targets.
NPCCC prefers (not insists upon) a bit greater distance, usually at least 27
feet. Sometimes, designing a good stage can be difficult while still
keeping that distance, so any time hard objects are introduced into the
range they should be thought of as a primary point from which to locate
other design elements.
Beyond the safety considerations, USPSA also has some generalized rules
about course design that begins with: "Practical competition is freestyle.
In essence, the competitive problem is posed in general and the
participant is permitted the freedom to solve it in the manner he(she)
considers best within the limitations of the competitive situation as
provided."
What that means is that courses should be as unrestricted as possible.
Shooting boxes or other devices that force a shooter to shoot from a
specific position are discouraged (except when they're needed for safety
purposes). The course design, in terms of props like barricades,
ports and slits, barrels, and other obstructions, should do the forcing, not boxes creating
hard points.
On the other hand, USPSA uses fault lines, generally orange 1x2 wood
strips on the ground, as allowable design elements, in part to channel the
flow of the action, and in part to reduce the amount of barricade-building
needed to cause that channeling. This is in addition to their use as
safety devices intended to prevent shooters from approaching too closely
to bounceback or other hazards.
There are some important considerations in design that have to do with the
physical plant. NPCCC has a hard-rolled gravel range surface.
This improves footing and weather-resistance, but might tend to cause
riccochets going out of the range area. Therefore, it's important to
consider target placement vis-a-vis the dirt berms. Don't set up
targets that will result in bullets striking the hard floor surface at angles
likely to send them in unsafe directions. Steel should be as close
to soft dirt as possible so that misses hit the dirt. Paper targets
should be set so that the bullets passing through also hit dirt.
What should be strictly avoided are setups that have bullets hitting
gravel (it's bound to happen, of course) a higher angles, so that they
might bounce over the berms, or such that bounces don't go right into
dirt. A little thought about that concept should make it all the
more evident.
More general design concepts
One small kink in USPSA course design rules limits the number of rounds required
in a given position to eight. This is in part intended to keep the
shooter moving and avoids stationary stand-and-shoot stages. Indeed,
in the rules for medium and long (field) courses, the design must not
allow the entire array of targets to be shot from any one spot.
Speaking of course types, these are covered in the rules in Chapter 1.2.
One important takeaway is that there is no round count maximum for courses
at the club level; 32 is the limit for higher levels. Still, going
too much beyond 32 results in stages that are long and slow to operate.
For our four-bay layout, we find that stages running from 24 to 28 rounds
seem to work best, while still giving the competitors a sufficiently high
round count total for the match.
That leads to another important point in design: creating stages that are
efficient. No one like to have their squad die on a stage, where the
action is so slow that there seems nothing to do but wait. The best
stages are laid out in a way that the basic operations of running a
competitor through the stage are as streamlined as possible.
The reset of the stage is often the part that causes the most slowness.
The range officer, scorekeeper, and competitor should be able to do the
scoring after the range is cleared in a smooth, swift flow. Setting
up physical barriers that cause backtracking can take up time and
slow things down. This element of design quickly becomes apparent
once a shooter starts to think about it, and that's all that's required to
see in advance how the reset will go. If there's a channel or back
route that has the scoring/reset group moving back up the course to the
start point in a
fairly linear fashion, it'll go much faster.
A good design concept to keep in mind is making stages that are easy to
clear: create sightlines for the range officers to be able to see the
whole course with a minimum of running around, so that little time is
wasted preparing the next shooter. It's best if the RO can just take
a step or two, or crouch down to see under the barricade walls, to make
sure the range is clear before going hot. There are times when using
snow fence may serve this goal better; the downside to using snow fence
for barricade is that it allows the shooter to pick up targets visually
earlier in the course and reduces the sight-and-shoot challenge.
It's important to make the courses as accessible to all shooters as
possible. Don't create over or under barriers that particularly
handicap shooters of one stature or another. An array that's
difficult to access for a shorter person might be quite easy for a taller
one, or vice-versa. The design problem here is that it makes the
course inherently easier for some shooters, then, and that goes against the
concept of giving all competitors an exactly equal course to work with.
For situations where you'd like to use ports to control the action, try to
use slits in the barricade walls instead; this can get rid of height
advantages.
Don't make setups wherein a shooter might have to really struggle
to get a shot; it's not safe, either, in addition to making the course
inequitable.
That also means that when you are trying to create a physically
challenging shot, it is much the same for as many of the shooters as
possible. If one needs to just crouch while another needs to get
nearly prone, it may not be as fair as you'd like. However, stages
that are "adjustable" for different abilities are not legal in the rules
under the concept of identical presentations.
On that other hand, though, USPSA doesn't allow specifying shooting
postures for field courses, only standards and classifiers.
In the end, the idea is make setups that challenge the competitor's
shooting ability, and not other abilities such as height or knee health,
or make the equipment excessively important.
It should all be about the shooting.
One other design note that applies to multi-gun and other long-gun
specialty matches: an NPCCC club rule prohibits competitors from firing
solid projectile long guns (rifles and shotguns shooting slugs) while
actually moving. This in one case where shooting boxes are helpful
to defining to the competitor that he or she must be stationary.
As with everything else here, asking about these things can go a long
way towards making it simpler.
A look at the physical plant a stage
director has to work with
NPCCC has four bays available for pistol and rifle stages, and
one for shotguns with small-shot loads only (#7 or smaller). Each of
the so-called pistol bays is generally 45 yards deep, of which close to 40
yards is really useable for stage setup. They vary in width, with Bay One
and Bay Four (rifle bay) being narrower at about 15 yards maximum.
Bay Two is a bit wider and Three wider still, at an average of about 27
yards.
Note that the intermediate berm between Two and Three is
angled, so that Two is wider at the top and narrower at the bottom, and
Three is the reverse.
See the
satellite view from Google Earth for a better picture of the bay
layouts.
Unlike some other clubs with shallower bays, ours tend to call for more
vertical stages, with more downrange movement and direction and less
traverse movement. The differences in the shape and dimensions of
the bays are why the stage director assignments are bay-specific.
We have an inventory available of all props, including target stands,
operating target holders such as swingers and droppers, poppers and other
steel, barrels, wall panels, and other components. The club
realistically has plenty of material for all of the stages likely to be
set up at any one time, but a bit of planning will be needed to make sure
that all of one particular item doesn't get used up before all four stage
directors are done in a given month.
We have learned by experience
that through thoughtful stage design and nesting the stages
together properly we can get two good ones to fit together in Bays Two and
Three.
That way, we can present five- or six-stage matches of good quality.
If you'd like to do a double stage bay, let's talk about it so we can make
sure it fits into the general program and doesn't cause any slow spots.
Stage planning approval and integration.
Our stage director concept has all of the SDs submitting their plan to me
(Bill) at least three weeks out. Two weeks is doable but causes
strains up and down the line.
USPSA scoring is done on scoresheets that are specific to the stage: they
must be printed up ahead of time and must contain exactly the actual
number of paper and steel targets to be used. This is a difference
from some other action pistol disciplines.
The course descriptions are a crucial element, too: all scoring and
assessing of penalties comes from the written description. It needs
to be pretty much perfect. Last second changes during the start of
the match don't work, especially if a stage winds up being thrown out.
Every competitor facing exactly the same stage is vital, making a written
description right from the start key.
That's not to say elements can't be altered on match day. If a
problem shows up and no one's shot the course yet, a target can be moved
to obviate a shoot-through or other issue. But the number and type
of targets can't change, so be consistent with yourself.
There are template Word docs out there you can use to set up your written
description, so just look around or ask for one. There are also a
number of really easy and good software applications for producing a
graphic depiction of your stage, available in numerous websites such as
uspsa.org and the excellent Bend of the River site at
www.porkmasters.org (Hat tip: Dave
"Porkmasters" Warren.)
There's also the website http://www.stageexchange.com/
A final word about general course design
If you've shot a good number of action pistol matches, you've no doubt
come to realize that all courses of fire come down to just a few basics:
there are targets, and the design causes any one of several different
approaches to engaging them to be needed. Obscuring targets with
barricades, barrels, and no-shoot targets creates the problems to be
solved. You might want to think of all courses as being composed of
corners to be gotten around. Once reduced to such a basic conceptual
level, it's pretty simple: create problems for the competitor to solve. |
