When we lived in Idaho, I was a match director for 3 gun for several years. Some people would do a walk through of the stage and then as the RO follow them as the RO, would see some do things that made no sense at all in terms of shooting positions, distances to shoot from, etc. Make some changes to what is 'normal' in a stage and some shooters cannot function.
Most interesting thing I ever saw was when my oldest son and I set up a 'shoot house' using black plastic sheeting. It was a handgun only stage for the first run, then a rifle only stage, so no gun transition needed. Shooters were told that they were to engage targets as they saw them. We had static targets, no shoots, some partially hidden by cover and then a drop target (about 1.5 seconds of visibility) and swinging target coming out from behind cover. These were activated by a plate you stepped on. We were very clear that if you told others about the set up of the shoot house, you would be DQ'd.
As RO, I went through the shoot house with every shooter. What I found very interesting is that some shooters, who were generally very good at managing a stage when they could do a walk through first, had almost no clue what to do when they didn't know where targets were. One very good shooter asked me during the stage, do I shoot that target pointing at a IPSC target. My response was shoot the targets you can see. He shot from less than 10 feet away and missed the target completely. He was really rattled.
Best part was we moved and changed up targets between the stages. We removed the scoring target from the dropper and put up a no shoot. Probably 60% of the shooter shot the target as soon as it was turning, thus loosing points for shooting a no shoot. Best response was from a shooter who shot the no shoot, turned around and said "You bastards". I was laughing so hard a that.
Understand that people claim competitive shooting doesn't reflect real life situations but it sure does show what happens when they are affected by just the pressure of being on a timer.
