At The USPSA 2012 Michigan Sectional

So I attended and Competed in my First USPSA Sectional Match today.

This was my first major USPSA match. The match was held at the Livingston Gun Club in Brighton.

Robert came along to shoot the match. We both had preregistered so we showed up at 7:45 having stopped for coffee on the way, got signed in, squaded up and dressed for success.

The match was fun and challenging - p stages of fun and confounding shooting problems - drop turners, swingers and popover targets galore, as well as tricky target locations that could cause you to pass them by without seeing them unless your carefully paid attention tot he shooting angles.

As is typical for Livingston, the range staff - this time composed solely of certified USPSA range officers, as it was a championship match, and fellow shooters were great. Everybody had a great attitude and as usual were helpful with tips for shooting the more difficult courses of fire.

For quite a few of the courses of fire, the shooters kept the score as reported by the ROs and as usual I volunteered and did a lot of score-keeping.

I had one serious miss - dashing past a target and failing to engage it or even recognize it was there on one of the courses of fire that had many an interesting angle. It was a great run, but spoiled badly by the missed target and the dreaded failure to engage (FTE) penalty.

As luck would have it, I was spared the horror of the miss and FTE as the score-keeper that relieved me during my run failed to record my time. They then ran another shooter before they caught the error and I got to re-shoot the stage.

I made darn certain to engage that target and whacked it definitively with two A-zone hits. My recorded score for that stage was thus redeemed.

There were a lot of very good shooters at the match including a few masters and a grand master. I learned a lot and did pretty good -- though probably not my best shooting ever. I had a great time, and met some very nice people.

So I'm now waiting patiently for the scores to be posted as the stats master has 82 shooters to diligently process. While he is a magician with the stats, he's not a miracle worker so I expect it will be a few days before he's done.

In short, I'm hoping to escape being in last place, so we'll see how I do in a few days.