Rangemaster Instructor class, April 2018 pics and follow up

Found some pictures I took from the Rangemaster instructor class that we hosted back in April 2018.

Shooting the Casino Drill

Awards to top shooters in class

Post-class Coaching

A few people didn’t pass the instructor course due to falling short of the course required on the shooting tests after 2 attempts.  Tom allowed me the option to invite those students to return for some private coaching with me, to be completed within 30 days of the course, to tune up their skills and make a 3rd and final attempt on the shooting tests to earn their instructor rating.

I worked with 3 of those students (coaching all 3 to the passing level), and in all cases, the problems all related to the portions of the test that involved shooting beyond 10 yards.  The correction process involved these steps:

1) Verify the gun’s zero.

Checking your gun’s zero is something very few pistol shooters either know how to do, or bother to do.  We started by shooting groups at 15 yards, on an NRA B-8 target, from benchrest. This verified that the gun was hitting where the sights were aligned.  This was done with the ammo to be used for the test.

For 9mm pistols I like to zero my guns with 124 gr bullets, so that I can shoot anything from 115 to 150 gr 9mm loads and be reasonably close.  Zeroing the gun using either extreme of the range of bullet weights may result in a big change (usually vertical) at 15 yards or beyond.

A longer article about zeroing is on the KR Training website.

In two of the 3 cases, left-right changes were needed to get the gun zeroed at 15 yards.

2) Time management.

In the instructor class, Tom explains that most people only have one shooting speed (time spent on the sights, time spent pressing the trigger), and that speed is too slow for close targets, and too fast for targets past 10 yards.

Any time you are shooting a par time test, the goal is to use 90% of the time provided to fire your shots.  Most of the time, someone that scores poorly on the longer range strings of that type of test uses 50% or less of the available time – not aligning the sights as precisely as required, and pressing the trigger too hard and too fast.

One approach to correcting this problem is to remove the par times and simply run that section of the test scored purely on points.  Practice until a perfect score can be shot, with no time limit.  Then put a timer on it.  Most of the time, the shooter will be able to make the par time without speeding up at all.  If pushing for speed is required, often the increase is small.  Time pressure causes people to forget fundamentals; removing the timer refocuses on simply getting the hits and managing the trigger better.

90% or better passing scores shown below.