Rants, Raves, and Follow-ups

If you’re local to me, listen up. If you’re not local to me, just bear with me or skip ahead 30 seconds or so. At the end of the year I’m killing the Triangle Tactical competitive shooting calendar on the website.  There are a couple of reasons for this: It costs more than a hundred bucks a year for the software to keep it running. Not a huge deal, but it’s a factor. The time to keep it running is substantial. I can’t seem to keep it accurate. Matches start and stop even when they’re super local to me, and I don’t find out about it, and I don’t want people to get sent to a match somewhere and not have there be a match that day. I received a good bit of feedback on last weeks podcast. A bunch of Match Directors contacting me saying “yes, Lucas, you’re almost exactly right!” So, I want to dig into this a little more in the near future. It’s basically the “off season”, or at least the slow season for most of the country right now and I think this is a good time of year for most matches to startt putting things in place to make changes if they need to, so I want to dig into this a bit more. Also, maybe I didn’t make it clear, but I don’t have any issue with for profit matches. I’m a big fan of free markets, and if someone can figure out a way to run good matches, keep shooters happy, and make some money, I’m all about it. Personally, I think getting paid a good salary to run matches would be a great way to avoid burnout on the behalf of the MD. If it were my full time gig to run matches, I think I could pull that off for a while without getting completely burned out. However, sometimes with a part time gig, you just get burned out to the point that you just don’t want to do it, even one more time. I used to literally get paid to shoot guns. Like, the coolest newest guns, as soon as they came out. Most of you are probably thinking that that sounds like a dream gig, and in the beginning it was. I named the rate that I wanted to get paid, and was given the new guns and a bunch of ammo, and sent off to the range to do my thing. However, after a while, shooting just became monotonous and boring.   I’m still unbelievably appreciative of the company for thinking of me when they wanted someone to do this for them, but it just became a thing that I got tired of, and I think that’s exactly the same thing that Match Directors can go through. Because it’s a part time thing, and because it’s not a major source of income, it can just become monotonous over time, and you just dread it. I also received exactly 3 messages from concerned listeners, and one Match Director regarding another thing that I think is worth addressing: “Jersey Wearing Complainers” It was brought to my attention that there’ a certain type of shooter that MD’s absolutely hate, to the point that some of them will just walk away and never run another match, solely because of a couple shooters: the jersey wearing complainers. This is really interesting to me, because it’s something that I don’t see. I wear a jersey (with my own business on it, mostly so listeners can find me at matches, and partially to promote what I do) but I’m not representing anyone with it, but myself. I am Triangle Tactical, and it’s just me. But, I do frequently shoot with a bunch of other shooters who wear jerseys, and I don’t really see this. It sounds like the jersey wearing complainer has become a rampant thing in the shooting sports, and it’s something that needs to be addressed. I don’t have the answers, so I’ll just say this: If you’re a shooter, and you’re not impressed with a match, absolutely deliver your feedback to the Match Director, but do it in a way that’s actually constructive. If you’re idea of delivering feedback about a match to someone is to make anonymous forum posts, or just being a dick, don’t bother. I don’t know about you, but if I’m unhappy enough about something at a match, my goal is to improve that thing so that it can suck less in the future, or at the very least figure out why it was done that way, so I’ll at least have a little more understanding as to why it is the way it is. I think if you’re unhappy with something, you should absolutely bring it up to the MD. If you’re unhappy with it, chances are other shooters are unhappy with it as well, and if nobody says anything about it, it won’t improve, registration for the match will start to fall off, and the match might go away completely. On the flip side, if you’re a dick about it, the MD could throw his hands in the air and quit too. There’s a balance here. Just don’t be a dick.