Yea Amateur class. Last year won by a guy getting top 10 at every 2 day and is a pro one year later lol.
People need to stop worrying about cheap hardware. A trophy where you really didn't earn anything means nothing. Focus on getting better. New shooters have enough stuff to worry about and learn as it is.
This is one of the reasons why I don't hand out trophies at our club matches. For some reason it catches a lot of the better shooters off guard the first time they come out with to shoot with us, until I explain our goal with hosting monthly club matches.
Using your golf tournament analogy, I’ll ask you, how do you think that those who get to be pros get where they are? By shooting against those that they know they can beat or by playing with the best? Therefore they learn from and get to know the best. If they want to.
Or you can choose to pay for membership in a sanctioning organization of your choice and then you can truly compete score wise with anybody that your goals deem proper for you.
At club level, at least in our area, I feel the match directors have lost sight of what club matches used to be and should be. Club matches should provide the venue to give new shooters a positive first exposure to the game and the precision rifle community. They should provide the mid pack shooter a place to help peel back the next layer of the "onion". They should provide a venue for experienced to get match reps in to stay consistent. A good club level MD knows how to manage their matches in a way that provides that for each group because to truly grow and progress the sport at the club level you need all three groups to feed off of each other.
For some reason, a lot of the local level MDs want to treat club matches like they are one day PRO matches. Stupid complicated and contrived courses of fire, prize tables, and $100+ entry fees... Then they don't want to hurt feelings by dispersing the field of shooters evenly across the squads, so that shooters of every skill level get something from the day. I think a lot have lost sight or don't know what club matches used to be even just 5 years ago, let alone 10.
Up until last fall, I hadn't hosted a match in 4 years because I was over it, mainly the politics of it. I had enough local shooters twisting my arm to I where I caved and started hosting monthlys again. In NE last November, the PRS only had 11 regional members. Sounds like success.... yet those current MDs want to soapbox and politic in their echo chambers about why sport isn't growing at the local level, why they aren't retaining new shooters, what needs to happen, and so on. Those same MD can not look at what they are doing objectively and want disparage anyone that approaches it for a different angle. This has been my experience in my region, since getting back into it.
www.cdc.gov
