Well, the scores from the first match of the season are on our website at http://www.twincitiesidpa.com/results We had 31 shooters out, 33 guns fired and 12 of these were by shooters new to our club. Keith did a great job with all four stages as we worked around a mini 3 gun that was happening next to us at Del Tone.

Keith and I wanted to thank everyone for their assistance as we worked with only two stages, tore them down, set up new ones, all with a lot of new shooters. First match I've been at in a while where we not calling often for pasters, shooters to come to the line, etc. We were still done in 4 hours and I saw a lot of smiles as we walked off the range. We don't have to clean up at Del Tone <g>!

Jack has a match at the spacious Minnetonka Game and Fish on the Sunday the 16th and the dreaded Classifier on April 30. Both matches start setting up at 9:00pm, be early and help. Our next match is May 28 and Jack has no matches planned in May.

More on IDPA shooting later.......

Sorry for the endless newbie questions, but... would someone care to explain what the scoring means. I'm guessing the first number is your time to complete the course, in seconds (including penalties?), and the second number is the number of penalty seconds that was added to your score?

The stage number is the total time, which is actual time, + penalties and points down on target multiplied by .5. Thus if if took you 15 seconds to shoot the course, got one procedural (adds 3 seconds) and were down 7 points on the target 7 X .5 = 3.5 so the total for the stage is 15+ 3+ 3.5 gives you a stage time of 21.5 seconds. Hits on non threat targets add 5 seconds and FTN (failure to netralize) adds 5 seconds.

The number in brackets ( ) shows how many points down you were on the target. The goal is to help you balance speed with accuracy. Note that Brian Droege was only down 5 points on target, while Keith Ulfers shot much faster, but was down 34 points, and still won based on his speed.

Several other notes, we report all shooters in IDPA. I do not report Disqualification when it happens. I show Did Not Finish as all of us will get DQ'd, it is just a matter of time. I also report DNF when the shooter is having gun issues or has a physical/mental glitch that makes reporting seem unfair to the shooter. When John Podergois shot he did his usual good job, but had to leave after two stages. I just reported those two stages.

IDPA has no overall match winner, just folks who won the division and/or their classifcation within a division.

Our club is the only one in MN to use the ForScore software and thus we have the logos, classes, etc. I only report senior and distingushed seniors if they tell me they are in that group, so not everyone shows up.

As to questions, we all have to start sometime and we have no new shooters if we don't share. It's actually one of my favorite things about shooting, people are willing to share their experience and expertise.