Congratulations! So much to be learned from this thread! ;-)

Thank you for the nice thoughts.

Now that I am used to getting up at 5:00AM for the last two weeks, I'm up early this morning and before I get on the rood again for the day, I will write a little bit.

The first day we got up to what seemed like bunny conditions. The wind was not howling and the sky was clear, no rain in the forecast.

I think I neglected to point out that the target is the same at every distance, the FCWC LR target, which is equivalent to the NRA FC-LR1. So at 700 meters the 5-ring is somewhat larger than 1 MOA. This means that in competition, you need to get a high score or a clean at 700 yards because others will. 800 meters has to be high too because the 900 meter will be more difficult still.

We show up at the appointed time (actually an hour earlier,) and I set up my spotting scope and start looking at the target line. At 8:30 the girls go down on the trailers to the pits; they call them butts in Canada, the pits, not the girls.

I should explain that the competitors do not pull targets at Connaught. There is a girls school not far from there and they enlist them to come pull targets, for pay of course. The price of admission to the match includes the payment for the girls

Once the girls have gone down to the pits and the pits are sealed, the team captains draw the target assignment for the team, for the morning.

We walk all our equipment at the assembly area behind the target at the 700 meter line. And then we wait.at about 30 minutes prior to firing time, they call us to the line with all our equipment. By this time we have found out which teams are on either side of us and which targets the strong teams have. This is important information because we poach on each others targets. On the first day we only really know about the long time teams, like Team USA, Team Michigan, Team Virginia, Australia and Canada, These are established teams, strong teams with lots of competitions under their belt. If they stop shooting, perhaps there's a condition they detected that I should be aware of.

Yes, we use every trick in the book here; conditions, flags, geese migration pattern (a joke I'll come back to later,) and the target line.

When all the shooters are down on their mats and ready, I go through the checklist:

Elevation for the distance, set.
Rifles level.
Parallax dialed out.
Cellphones back in the carts (no transmitting devices allowed on the line.)

And then I give them my guess for the windage setting as I see it in the conditions. Something that should get us in the black and hopefully to the 4 ring or better.

When the blow off commences, I am monitoring the impact on the berm trying to see if my windage guess is decent. It was; the guys are having fun crushing spots on the berm. The 4 minute blow off period comes to an end. We are called to get ready to start the match.

At this point, I have the scorer from the other team sitting behind me and to my right, I have one of the shooters behind me close and to my left looking at the conditions with me and I have yet another shooter sitting with the scorer to verify and also to plot our shots and keep track of our score. We leave nothing to chance.

The order of firing was established the night before and we stuck to it rigidly. We put our top shooter for the week as #1, followed by the second best as second and so on. The thinking is that in early morning conditions, we want to get as close to a clean with a high V-count as we can. Then sticking with the same rotation prevents people from trying to figure out who's next and so on. It also helps the scorer to know who's firing.

When the targets come up, I start my 85 minute clock. and then we wait for the first shots to go down and be scored. I'm in no hurry to show anything to my competitors; I'd much rather they show me stuff. Within a few seconds shots are going down and targets are being scored. If I see something really weird on the targets, like they are all way to the right or left, I may increase the windage before firing. Then we start the dance. I will start feeding corrections from what I was seeing in the berm for that shooter and then he fires on my command.

We fire two sigthers for every shooter in every match. If we like the score we get with the sigthers, we can convert them to scoring shots. So let's say My first sighter is a 5 and then the second sighter is a V, we can tell the scorer that we are converting both to score, so the next shot will be number 3. If the sigthers are 4 and V, we can elect to convert just the second one and the next shot will be 2 on. If the sigthers are 5 and 4, we cannot elect to only take the first one; it's either both, the second only or none.

Remembering that in a shooting competition you cannot make up points, only lose them; the less you fire they less the chances of screwing up. Remember my rule #3 for winning matches; Screw up less than the others. So if I get one or two good sighters, I convert them. A 5 will never hurt you; they win matches. A V is no better than a 5 in F-TR, matches are very rarely decided on V-count; we are not belly-benchrest, I mean F-Open.

So we go through the shooters one by one. I am feeding corrections to the shooters and giving them the command to fire monotonously, my assistant is telling me to increase or decrease the hold depending on what he's detecting in the flags while I focus on the mirage and calls a hold if he detects something changing. Many times I call for a hold when the mirage does something funky and on it goes. After every shot, the scorer announces the value and the round count. Usually. We have some that have never done this before but the vast majority do a great job.

We shoot two cleans and I think we dropped 6 total out of 60 shots. A few to elevation and I think one or two to wind (my fault.) The range officers clear our rifles and we quietly extricate from the line and go back to the assembly area. Everything has gone rather well, but we did drop some points and others won't.

Or so we think.

That afternoon, at the second distance, 800 meters, we dropped another 12 points, IIRC, as the wind started acting up. It was going back and forth and quartering on us or going full value at the drop of a hat.

We used the "pilot technique" for the first time. This is when during a string, the conditions change dramatically and refuse to go back to what you had before. We can elect to have a subsequent shooter fire a sighter and see what's going on. Even with that, it's always best guess, not just wildly shooting. It would be bad to fall off the target, wasting the sighter.

It worked for us and we were able to finish all shooters without losing too many points.

We got off the line and then regrouped at the 900 meter assembly area.

I should point out that by this time, various teams are trying to find out how each of the other teams fared. So they all ask "how did you guys do?" I try to avoid answering because I don't want to reveal how badly we think we are doing. Everybody thinks all the other teams did well while they shot poorly.

That's somewhat of a fallacy, as we always find out, but it's though to guage how well you did in the conditions.

A couple hours later we shot the 900 meters and finished around 6PM. We dropped 24 points on that one. Overall, I was happy. We never missed or shot anything worse than a 4 (9 for the US targets.) We had accumulated about 60 Vs. We went back to our rented house for the night and a review.

A few hours later the results were posted on-line and that's when we discovered that we were in second place, 14 points behind the leading team and 3 points ahead of the Ottawa (local) team. We all went to bed early because the next day would be brutal and intense. We were ahead of some major teams and that was a shock to all.

The next day, the final day of competition, was a beautiful day, but everybody on the team was tense. We got to the range and our captain drew the target assignment. We gathered at the assembly area behind our target and waited nervously. We were looking at bunny conditions with some let offs and switches. The range flags were barely moving but the mirage was flowing quite a bit.

We noticed that after the prior day's results showed that this Podunk club team belonged at world-level competition, we had a lot more people sniffing around us and talking with us.

We had elected to do everything the same as the prior day, same order of fire and so on; no need to change or fine-tune anything.

The morning 700 meter match went well, we dropped 6 points, the same as the prior day. The conditions were not quite a "bunny" as the flags indicated. Of course, at this point we had several other teams come ask how we did; there didn't seem to be any major shift in the standings.

That afternoon, we shot the 800 meter match. The conditions had deteriorated and the mirage was fickle to say the least and shifting rapidly. At times, under cloud cover, it would disappear making things very difficult. Somehow we caught on to a reliable indicator and plowed through. By the time we had 3 shooters done, we had dropped only 3 points. The last shooter was my backup wind caller and things got a little more difficult for me to watch the whole range and the mirage simultaneously. He dropped a point early on, and at the end we dropped a couple more points when I didn't increase the hold enough during a pickup that I was not following closely enough while looking at the mirage.

This occurred when the flags quartered less and moved to a fuller position yet the mirage was not showing that. We pushed 2 shots just into the 4 ring on the right.

So we had dropped 6 on the 800 meter line, much less than the same distance the prior day. As I walked back to the 900 meter assembly area, one of the "big team" was gathering on the target next to ours and they asked "how did you guys do?" I said, "we did fine." He said "We only dropped 16." I replied, "that's great, we dropped 6." The departure of the smile was instantaneous.

The rest of the team members gathered around and someone said, "I walked down the line and somebody told me that an F-TR team had dropped only 6 points on that relay. I told him, yeah, that was us."

We had no clue how the other teams did, and we were worried about that Ottawa team. This was their range; they had local knowledge and solid shooters. We knew they were not making many mistakes, but we were holding our own vis-a-vis the other big teams behind us.

One more distance to go and the conditions were deteriorating further.

Great story and great work.

Congrats to all of you.

RMd

Finally got home last night. It's a 3 day trek at my age. Driving alone limits me to about 700 miles a day.

Before I write up the last relay and the aftermath, I wanted to take a time out to explain a few things.

Some of the team members had never shot in a big match such as the nationals and this was their first experience and they reported things to the team that were funny.

You should know that we had a team shirt, a nice Polo shirt with our logo and the name of the wearer. We each had 4+ shirts. During the individuals, shooters wear their colors and for example, the Aussies have 2-3 different shirts, but all mostly yellow and that stands out in a crowd. Some of the shirts are very fancy and professionally designed and executed. I designed the logo and got a company on-line to put it on shirts, caps, etc. Unlike most of the other teams, we are not sponsored and so everything comes out of our pockets. Including the travel entry fee, lodging, food, etc.

So leading up to the team matches, the "semi-pro" shooters, while still being nice to us, certainly do not go out of their way to talk to us much. I know most of them so they talk with me, but they ignored the other team members.

After the first day of team matches, when we showed up in second place, the dynamic changed rapidly. This is what surprised the team members. One second they are ignored and the next people are introducing themselves and asking them questions.

On Thursday, all the teams were looking at each other but it seemed fairly certain Da Bulls were going to win, so people were hoping to get into the medals. That painted a target on us as well as KP-Ballistics, the team that was in third place the night before. There were very few points between second and eight place. Anything could happen as the buffer was very small.

I told the team to be VERY professional and not make a single mistake because we were being observed by many teams and if we flubbed something there would be a protest and we could get points taken off. So we made doubly sure to leave all cellphones behind in our carts before coming to the line and followed every single rule from ICFRA (and there are a lot.)

I also instructed the team to make sure there was no screw-ups with the scoring. We kept track and the scorer wrote down what he saw. We had a few instances where he wrote the wrong value down and another where he missed a shot, a V to be exact. When this was discovered, it had to be resolved right away before the next shot went down, because if it wasn't that next shot meant we accepted the scorer's value.

That lead to a tense moment during a great condition, when the scorer missed a V. We had to get match officials involved and I was fuming on the line. They quickly resolved the error in our favor, but that broke our cadence for that condition. It's all part of the game, but you have to be ready for it. I'm sure the scorer did not intentionally miss the shot, he probably dozed off. It's not like we are shooting every second; there are pauses. Also, I reminded the folks to make sure to hear the score and the round count from the scorer.

We also used pilot shots several times during the second day and we also converted many sighters. That's to be expected as the two days were very similar temperature-wise and we had recorded our elevation come-ups very rigorously.

My rule was simple shoot as few shots as you can, you cannot make up points, you can only lose points. So we converted sighter 5s and not just the Vs. Other teams just wanted to convert Vs. Silly others.

After the 800 meter round, some of the team members were reporting that other teams were in a tizzy. I also had the wind coach of the leading team come over to me to tell me that we are putting pressure on them, which they did not expect. Of course, he was also playing the game of putting pressure on ME. These are all head games. I kept telling the team members to ignore all this and just concentrate on the last relay. All this stuff going on was just distracting. That is why I never look at scores during a championship, but my team members had different opinions.

The big issue is that nobody had a list of the scores by team for each of the distances. The rumor that an F-TR team had only dropped 6 at the 800 was true; it was us. But we had no idea what the other teams did, especially the Da Bulls and KP-Ballistics. I didn't want to know; I did not need those numbers in my head during the final relay. My thought was if we did well, so did they.

In rereading this, I realize we have left the world of rifle shooting and marksmanship and are now deep in high stakes competition. I'm positive this is not unique to our game.

At this stage, we were gathering our stuff at the 900 meter assembly area. The tension was in the air, but also palpable was the fact we didn't know where we stood in relation to the other teams. But we were aware that we had done well at the first two distances and if we kept it up, we could be in the medals.

We set up on the line at the start of the 15 minute prep time and I realized that the conditions had changed again and the wind was faster.

We finished the prior round at 800 meters with 2 MOA on the gun, holding 2-3 lines left. When the firing started I had the first shooter take down a half MOA on the gun and we got going. We dropped a few points, but it was going well, we did pause a few times for some minutes, waiting for the conditions to return. So shooting took longer than usual.

The second shooter started going and I also had him remove a half MOA on the gun. The conditions kept changing and we paused several times to wait for the return to the main conditions. When the second shooter was finished, 50+ minutes had elapsed. We were picking and choosing our conditions, but time was elapsing.

We got the third shooter to start, after he took off the half MOA in his rifle. Then at shot 10, we collected a 4 at 10 o'clock high. The wind had shifted faster than we believed and we got hurt. I halted at that point and for the next 10 minutes or so, I kept looking at the high 4. I also saw much worse scores on the targets near ours. The wind was not coming back and time was elapsing. The team in the lead had finished firing already, we were only 60% done and it was getting worse. The Ottawa team had paused like us and so had the other big teams.

With about 25 minutes remaining on the clock, we decided to shoot a pilot from our fourth shooter to see what the heck was happening out there. Sighter 1 was a 2, I think out the left. Totally different than what we had before, we were heading for a trainwreck.

My assistant wind guy was the one on the ground shooting, he had a different view compared to what he was seeing before.

I pulled the plotting sheets and looked at my notes, then I decided to remove the windage from his rifle and shoot 2 lines right. His second sighter was a 5, which we promptly converted. We decided to continue to shoot him and light shooter 3 stay on the ground.

We fought through and picked and chose the shots and I think we only dropped 8 for the fourth shooter. I was seeing other teams try to shoot also, but they were getting bad results. We were shooting Vs and 5s with the occasional 4, and they were shooting 3s or worse.

One of my other shooters told me after the match, that the team on our right, a big name team, had one of their shooters try to look at the setting on the riflescope of our fourth shooter to try to figure out how we were doing it. Too funny.

Once we finished shooter 4, I was still confronted with 5 shots remaining for shooter 3.

Panic was close.

I pulled out the plots for his shots, compared to what we did for shooter 4 and then I made the call; remove all windage from the gun and hold 2 lines LEFT. Remember that we had been holding on the right for shooter 4.

When you say "a hush fell on the attendance," this was THE poster child for that expression. Then I looked through the scope and the mirage was gone because the sun was now behind a cloud. I called again, "2 left... Fire."

The target went down. Meanwhile my assistant wind caller and I were discussing what we would get. To be honest, we really had no clue.

The target stayed down for what seemed like an eternity and panic was being replaced by raw dread.

Then the target started coming back up, very slowly and the shot appeared.

A PINWHEEL V.

I think the entire line heard the "whoop" coming from my lips. Shooter 3 was agog as was the rest of the team. The scorer called out "V eleven on!" Quickly we resumed shooting and banged out 2 more Vs and a 5 and the last shot was a small leak into a 4. That was the last shot of the entire match for us.

We gathered our stuff off the line and retreated to the assembly area with 15 minutes to spare. The Ottawa team was still shooting.

We packed our stuff and went to a restaurant in Kanata where I could get some C2H5OH to calm my nerves. Shooter 3, was still in a daze; "how did you figure that one out? I had no clue what was going on anymore."

This is the shot that legends are made of.

What I did was make shooter 3's rifle the same as shooter 4's and then take into account the differences in ballistics between the two loads. Shooter 3 had the best ballistics and shooter 4 had the worst. So I took a guess and held on the other side and hoped for the best.

This does not happen to real teams; they all use the same bullet and load and their ballistics are all similar.

We had started with that concept, but if you read this thread in its entirety, you will notice that we had to swap people out as some dropped off and the new guys did not have the opportunity to change their loads to the group standard.

While at the restaurant, we started looking at the results as they were getting posted and we had to be back by 6:30 for the awards. The tension was high because the results were posted by shooter, not team. We did some figuring and realized that we had done good job stemming the flow and we thought we were third or fourth.

Just before we had to leave the restaurant to get back for the awards, the final results were posted and we found out we got third overall. The Ottawa team had screwed up less than we did, local knowledge is always good and the bested us by 3 points. They are an awesome team. The leading team did very well banging out the 900 meter relay before the changes. Sometimes shooting fast works very well.

Nobody else gained much of anything so we got bronze.

When we got to the awards, we had not had a chance to go clean up and people were looking at use crosseyed, until the team was called up to receive our medals.

It was surreal, third in a field of 14 teams at the World Championship. This was the first team match for several of our members and they all did extremely well. Only the captain and I had shot team before, but we spent a lot of time training the other members and that helped greatly.

Well, that's pretty much it. Our 800 yards kept us in the game and that V on shot 11 kept us in the medals as Team USA was 3 points behind us and with a higher V-count.

I'm very proud of my teammates, they are awesome shooters and great team players. Nobody argued a wind call; they pointed and shot exactly where told, when told. My assistant wind reader helped a great deal keeping me aware of pick up and let-offs, and I factored that in my calls. The big teams all have multiple wind coaches, connected with intercoms, talking all the time. He just sat behind me and kept up the chatter of information. He would also call hold when he saw stuff and made sure I remembered right from left.

I hope you enjoyed the story; I'm omitting a lot of details because it can get really intricate and I take it for granted, but if you have specific questions, I'll try to answer.

NikonUser thank you for thoughtful tale. It was both educational as well as entertaining. Most of all congratulations on finishing in the medals.

Thank you low8option, I appreciate that.

Thank you for taking the time to write that up. It amazes me how much effort and skill goes into something like that. Mastering the stress that must come with competition at that level takes a lot of practice. Sounds like your team, in addition to having great coaching, stuck to the gameplan and didn't start second guessing themselves when it got tense. Bravo.

Ken

Congratulations! Thanks for taking the time to share these experiences with us.

Nice! Almost like being there. Great write-up.

Thanks,

RMD

quote:

Originally posted by KenS:
Thank you for taking the time to write that up. It amazes me how much effort and skill goes into something like that. Mastering the stress that must come with competition at that level takes a lot of practice. Sounds like your team, in addition to having great coaching, stuck to the gameplan and didn't start second guessing themselves when it got tense. Bravo.

Ken

KenS, thank you. I think more than anything else, it's experience that counts the most. Just like in most everything else. The stress level going into the second day was very high and yet we were all quiet and serene, sitting in the assembly area. I made sure nobody was saying things like; don't do this, or don't do that. (An example, "don't crossfire.") The few comments were all positive; "listen to my voice only," or "pace yourself, this will be fun," or some similar stuff. With about 5 minutes to go, I got up, went forward toward the line a little bit then quietly called the guys over. As they walked up I put out my right hand, and everybody pilled the hands on top of mine and each other. Then I put my other hand on top and said something stupid like "we're a team, let's do this thing." I like to think that calmed everyone down. I know it did that to me. (Like in a campy movie.)

We kept everything the same for the second day and one thing that I did was force myself to be calm giving the commands. Calm even voice that the shooters could listen to and follow. I know that whatever stress I feel can be transmitted to the shooter in my voice so I forced myself to stay calm while giving the commands. Easy monotone voice. I had discussed this the night before with the assistant wind caller and he really emphasized that some of our shooters really needed to be coached evenly; no stress.

The shooters al told me that they absolutely loved shooting team. These are top shooters in their own right but they absolutely know that they need to follow my voice commands. More than one told me afterward that he had no clue what I was looking at to make the calls, he heard a little of the discussion between us wind coaches but knew to only listen to me. It's the only way or else he could get contradictory commands. The shooter on the line only needs to concentrate on putting the reticle where told to do so and execute the shot when told to and in his very best form. For the coach, there is nothing better than to hear the report of the rifle going off within a second or so of when I say "fire," knowing that the shooter is one of the very best on the planet and is utterly reliable. The crowning event is when the target comes up with a V, and another V, and again, and again...

I can totally depend on the shooters, they would never second guess the wind coach as that way lies disaster and madness. I don't even think that thought even enters their mind. When I shot for a team, I would be so totally concentrated on following the commands and being ready to shoot on command, I had no time to second guess the coach, simply no time. When the coach says, "hold, take a break," most times I would roll on my back and relax. That's what most team shooters do. They let the wind coach call the wind and they concentrate on following the commands precisely and taking the best shot they can. When their sight picture is not exactly according to command when the shot breaks, they let me know so I can factor that in. That is very critical.

Also, there are ways to know when the shooter is not following your commands. But that's another story.

Sorry if this got too involved here, but it gave me a chance to delve deeper into team shooting dynamics. Let me finish this post by saying that if you ever go to a match where there is team shooting, do whatever you can to get on a team. It's absolutely the most fun you can have with a rifle and your clothes on. I decided to form this team because I love team shooting and I know that I am nowhere near good enough to be invited to join an established team to go to these big events. It took 4 years and a lot of effort to get it all together and it was worth it. The face, the smile on the team members faces when we medaled and afterwards made it all worth it. In all honesty, we performed far better than I ever imagined we would, especially when you look at the list of teams against which we competed.

Ok, enough rambling. I need to get back to reality.

quote:

I decided to form this team because I love team shooting and I know that I am nowhere near good enough to be invited to join an established team to go to these big events.

Regardless your motivations or skill(which I believe you underestimate) Nikon, it sounds like you were of great benefit to your team as a leader and calming influence, congratulations sir!

That, Sir, is one of the best write-ups I can recall of just what it takes to stand on the winners' podium of a World C lass rifle competition.

A thousand thanks to you, and many congratulations to the team.

tac

Stoic-one and tacfoley, thank you so much for the nice thoughts. I'm a little speechless (which is rare for me.)

Congratulations to you and your team.
A very illuminating read.
Thank you.

how cool...congratulations.
wonderful write up, enjoyed it so very much

Xl_target and m.tenenhaus, thank you for your kind words.

After reviewing the scores, I discovered that I am now ranked as an International Master for ICFRA, That's their highest classification. Boy, that and $3 will get me a coffee at Tim Horton's.

Last night I was explaining to my family that there were gaggles of geese on the range when we shot. During the individuals, I remember holding on target at an apparent 2 inches above the head of a Canada, with the vertical stadia wire along its neck. Talk about distracting.

I also explained that when the Canadas flew, they would always follow one specific goose. I told them the reason was because he had the GPS unit for the flock. The Goose Positioning System receiver.

They didn't think it was funny either.

Congratulations, Nikon, to you and your Team for quite an accomplishment.

For me, I've learned a lot about long-range shooting from your most informative posts on the subject of long-range and precision/team shooting.

So much so that I just purchased a CZ 455 Varmint in .22, and have a Burris Timberline 4.5-14x.32 scope incoming. I'm pretty excite to set this rifle up to see how well I can learn to drive it at 200 yards.

Congratulations again!