2013 Arizona Spring Steel Shooting Match

The 2013 Spring Steel match was held at the beginning of march at the Rio Salado Sportsman's club in Mesa Arizona and as always, it was a lot of fun. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this event, this is an annual shooting competition which requires the participants to draw from a holster, shoot, reload, run to multiple positions, and hit moving targets, all while trying to remember which targets to shoot, remember where to run, and being timed.

It sounds complicated, but once you figure out the pattern, it's not too bad.

Here's what a typical stage looks like. Well, actually this is just half of it, the other half is out of the frame on the left side, but looks identical. In this case, the "poppers" or the tall slender targets were "no shoots" and if you knocked them down while trying to hit the squares, you incur a 5 second penalty for each one.
http://antinode.smugmug.com/photos/i...xgzqg9w-XL.jpg

This isn't the instructions for the above stage, but this gives you an idea of how the competitors figure out how to shoot the stage.
http://antinode.smugmug.com/photos/i...-x4dS2Cf-L.jpg

All in all, there were 8 stages. As my friend said to me as we were driving out there at the crack of dawn, we were going to spend 12 hours out in the sun for 3 minutes of shooting!

Here, a guy in Open division shoots his highly modified 1911 (actually a so called 2011). The very fastest shooters will shoot 20 rounds in less than 10 seconds or so, depending on the complexity of the stage.
http://antinode.smugmug.com/photos/i...LgVCxbP-XL.jpg

It's not only the guys who shoot as there were quite a few women too:
http://antinode.smugmug.com/photos/i...H3vWbVm-XL.jpg

http://antinode.smugmug.com/photos/i...xpkVSD6-XL.jpg

These three guys actually flew in from Japan to shoot this competition. They said they practice in Japan with airsoft guns and they actually did really well with the real thing.
http://antinode.smugmug.com/photos/i...-VcMMjx4-L.jpg

http://antinode.smugmug.com/photos/i...-RNKDx99-L.jpg

This guy won it all. He's very fast.
http://antinode.smugmug.com/photos/i...WNQNXB5-XL.jpg

For those of you into shooting, you may have heard of the name Rob Leatham. Here he is:
http://antinode.smugmug.com/photos/i...-J2jX77H-L.jpg

And a few more of the locals:
http://antinode.smugmug.com/photos/i...-h8M7Wrs-L.jpg

http://antinode.smugmug.com/photos/i...-r97RnQd-L.jpg

The rest of the pictures can be seen here:
http://antinode.smugmug.com/Firearms...8332421_7SDRcL

Pretty cool Steve. The range I joined a few months ago runs regular USPSA/IDPA matches, I'm gonna try that one of these days.

http://www.aipshooters.com/

Tom, do it! It's a load of fun. I also noticed your club has a steel match, which might be an easier, less intimidating way to get into the sport or at least that's the way it is here. We have a weekly steel match which is kind of the stepping stone into the rest of action shooting, however it's perfectly fine to shoot idpa/uspsa first.