I took my 16” 6.5 Creedmoor AR-10 to my first PRS match and it was the first time taking the gun out past 200 yards. Overall, it was a lot of fun, met a lot of great people, and gained a lot of confidence in this rifle. I did have one failure to extract malfunction but it was otherwise good.
For anybody that was out with me, thanks for helping me along as a new competitor.
It was definitely challenging. Not just from a technical perspective, but also from getting a handle on the procedures during the rushed cadence and to validate my ballistic calculator drops during a match.
Overall, I think I did pretty well for a first time out. Definitely a lot of room for improvement. I managed to take top of my division, but that’s not saying much and I was pretty low on the overall scoreboard.
I was pretty happy with the performance out at 1k yards. After a couple shots of missed wind reads, I hit 4 IPSC targets in a row out there. That’s rather satisfying. But then the wind started reversing occasionally.
Lessons learned:
- Get your mind right, try to forget the stress as a new competitor. On my first stage, it was steadily increasing targets from 300-780. This should have been fairly easy, but I got in my head and only got 4 hits out of the 8 shots I got off. My fundamentals mostly went out the window. Trigger squeeze was fine, but I did not get a natural point of aim, nor did I incorporate breathing into my shot cadence.
- Practice getting into a position and your shot cadence at home. Now that I know the timeline of most stages (105 seconds), I can practice some timed dryfire to get the pace down pat.
- KYL targets are a bitch. Validating your ballistic calculations beforehand and getting your wind reads on point are key. It doesn’t help that my first 5 shots were with the wrong dope dialed in. Which leads me to…
- Make your DOPE cards clearly readable to be easy to check quickly under stress. I accidentally dialed on my stage number instead of the DOPE. I’ll have to more clearly differentiate them next time.
- Don’t forget about your parallax settings. Accidentally left mine at 300 yards until I got to the 2nd to last stage at 1k.
For anybody that was out with me, thanks for helping me along as a new competitor.
It was definitely challenging. Not just from a technical perspective, but also from getting a handle on the procedures during the rushed cadence and to validate my ballistic calculator drops during a match.
Overall, I think I did pretty well for a first time out. Definitely a lot of room for improvement. I managed to take top of my division, but that’s not saying much and I was pretty low on the overall scoreboard.
I was pretty happy with the performance out at 1k yards. After a couple shots of missed wind reads, I hit 4 IPSC targets in a row out there. That’s rather satisfying. But then the wind started reversing occasionally.
Lessons learned:
- Get your mind right, try to forget the stress as a new competitor. On my first stage, it was steadily increasing targets from 300-780. This should have been fairly easy, but I got in my head and only got 4 hits out of the 8 shots I got off. My fundamentals mostly went out the window. Trigger squeeze was fine, but I did not get a natural point of aim, nor did I incorporate breathing into my shot cadence.
- Practice getting into a position and your shot cadence at home. Now that I know the timeline of most stages (105 seconds), I can practice some timed dryfire to get the pace down pat.
- KYL targets are a bitch. Validating your ballistic calculations beforehand and getting your wind reads on point are key. It doesn’t help that my first 5 shots were with the wrong dope dialed in. Which leads me to…
- Make your DOPE cards clearly readable to be easy to check quickly under stress. I accidentally dialed on my stage number instead of the DOPE. I’ll have to more clearly differentiate them next time.
- Don’t forget about your parallax settings. Accidentally left mine at 300 yards until I got to the 2nd to last stage at 1k.
Last edited:
otherwise just another challenge
