How to Run Your First Level 1 Match
A practical timeline, the roles you actually need, and an honest list of what goes wrong the first time. Written for club officials organising their first practical shooting match, whatever software they use.
Running a club match is not hard. It is just a lot of small things that all have to be ready on the same morning, and the first time you do it, none of them are where you expect them to be. This guide is the checklist we wish someone had handed us: what to do when, who has to own it, and the failures that show up at almost every first match.
Nothing here is platform-specific, and none of it replaces your region's rulebook. Rules for safety, scoring, and division equipment come from your national body — read the current edition and keep a copy at the range. What follows is everything the rulebook does not tell you.
First, make it smaller than you want to
The single most common first-match mistake is ambition. A first match should be four or five stages, sixty to a hundred rounds total, and thirty to forty shooters. That is a match you can set up in one afternoon, run in one morning, and tear down before everyone is exhausted.
You will be tempted to build the elaborate stage you have been sketching for months. Build it at your third match. At your first one, every extra prop is one more thing that can be missing, broken, or in the wrong bay at 07:30.
The timeline
Eight weeks is comfortable for a first match. Six is doable. Under four and you will be improvising, which is survivable but not fun.
| When | What has to happen |
|---|---|
| 8 weeks out | Pick the date and check it against other matches in your region. Book the bays. Confirm insurance, range permissions, and who is allowed to be on the property. Decide the format: discipline, divisions, and roughly how many stages. |
| 6 weeks out | Open registration. Draft the stage designs on paper. Line up your Match Director and Range Master now, not later — everything else hangs off those two people. |
| 4 weeks out | Confirm the Range Officer roster by name. Count your targets, stands, sticks, pasters, paint, and props against what the stage designs actually require, and order what is missing. This is the deadline that quietly decides whether your match runs on time. |
| 2 weeks out | Close registration and squad the match. Write the stage briefings. Confirm your scoring setup end to end, including what happens if the range has no signal. |
| 1 week out | Build and test any prop that moves. Walk each stage design against the bay's actual safety angles — on the ground, not on paper. Print the briefings, the squad lists, and the score sheets. |
| Day before | Set up. All of it, if the range allows overnight builds. Staple targets, paint steel, set walls, place fault lines, and physically confirm every shooting position against the backstop. |
| Match day | Check in, brief, shoot, score, tear down, publish. |
The roles you actually need
Small clubs try to run a match with three people and willpower. It works exactly once. These are the jobs that need an owner — a name, agreed in advance, not "someone will do it".
| Role | How many | What they own |
|---|---|---|
| Match Director | 1 | The match as a project: date, registration, squadding, communication, and every decision that is not a rules decision. They should not be running a stage. |
| Range Master | 1 | Safety and rules on the day. Final word on disqualifications, reshoots, and appeals. At a small club this is often the same person as the Match Director — separate them as soon as you can, because the two jobs collide at exactly the worst moment. |
| Stage designer | 1–2 | The stage designs and the equipment list that follows from them. Usually the person who then leads setup. |
| Range Officer | 2 per stage | Running the shooter and scoring the targets. One RO per stage technically works and will cost you an hour over the match. Two is the difference between finishing at noon and finishing at two. |
| Stats / scoring | 1 | Score entry, verification, and publishing results. Needs to be someone who will actually check the numbers rather than assume them. |
| Registration desk | 1–2 | Check-in, payments, waivers, squad changes, and answering the same six questions forty times. |
| Setup and teardown crew | 4+ | The day before and the hour after. Name them in advance — this is the crew that evaporates if you leave it to goodwill. |
If you are short on people, cut stages, not Range Officers. A four-stage match run properly is a good day. A six-stage match with one RO per stage is a five-hour queue with shooting in it.
Squadding
Squad size should be your shooter count divided by your stage count, rounded up, and then balanced so no squad is more than one person larger than another. A squad of twelve behind a squad of five turns your rotation into a traffic jam that never clears.
- Six to eight shooters per squad is the sweet spot for a club match.
- Spread your experienced shooters across squads — every squad needs someone who knows what they are doing.
- Keep one or two slots free for walk-ins and last-minute changes. There will be last-minute changes.
- Publish the squad lists before match day so people know where to be at the first horn.
Stage briefings
Write them down. Every stage, printed, laminated if you have the means, and identical for every squad. A briefing that lives in the Range Officer's head will be delivered four different ways to four different squads, and the fourth squad will be the one that protests.
Each briefing needs, at minimum:
- Stage name and number, round count, and scoring method
- Target types and quantity, including steel and no-shoots
- Start position, hand and gun condition, and where the ready position ends
- The start signal and what constitutes the end of the stage
- Any procedural constraint the stage imposes, stated in plain language
Match morning
This is a realistic schedule for a five-stage match with forty shooters, assuming setup was finished the day before.
| Time | What happens |
|---|---|
| 07:00 | Crew arrives. Final walk of every stage. Fix what the night changed — wind, rain, and animals all rearrange a range. |
| 07:30 | Registration opens. Check-in, payment, and any equipment checks your format requires. |
| 08:15 | Shooters meeting. Safety brief, cold range rules, squad assignments, rotation order, the medical plan, and where the first aid kit is. Introduce the Range Master by name so people know who to ask. |
| 08:30 | Squads walk to their first stage. Walkthrough, then first shot. |
| ~09:15 | First rotation. This is your reality check: if the first stage took longer than fifty minutes, you are running late and should say so out loud rather than hope. |
| 12:30–13:30 | Last squads finish. Scores verified and closed out stage by stage as squads leave, not all at the end. |
| After | Teardown, then publish results the same day. |
What goes wrong
Every item here has happened at a real first match, most of them at more than one.
Setup takes twice as long as planned
Always. Budget double, start the day before, and accept that the last stage will be finished in the dark by three people. If you genuinely cannot set up the day before, cut a stage.
Safety angles were checked on paper
A stage that looks fine in a sketch can put a shooting position at an angle the backstop does not cover. This is the failure that stops a match cold, because it cannot be fixed by carrying on carefully. Walk every position physically, gun in hand and unloaded, a week before — not on the morning, when your only options are a bad fix or a missing stage.
Not enough Range Officers
The most common cause of a match that runs two hours long. It compounds: a slow stage backs up the rotation, the backed-up squads get bored, and the ROs who were already tired make mistakes in the last hour. Two per stage, rostered by name.
You run out of consumables
Pasters and paint, always. Staples and target sticks, often. Count what one full rotation consumes and multiply by the number of squads, then add half again. Keep the surplus in one clearly marked place instead of scattered across the bays.
Scores are checked at the end instead of at the stage
This is the one that turns a good match into an argument. Every shooter should confirm their own score before leaving the stage, while the targets are still standing and the run is fresh. A disputed score discovered two hours later, with the targets pasted over, has no good resolution — you are choosing between a guess and a reshoot nobody wants.
The range has no signal and there was no fallback
Many ranges sit in dead zones, and the far bays are usually the worst. Decide in advance how you are scoring without connectivity and test it before match day. Paper score sheets as a backup cost nothing and have never failed to work.
New shooters were not identified
Your first match will attract people shooting their first match. They are simultaneously your highest disqualification risk and the entire reason the club grows. Flag them at registration, put them in squads with experienced shooters, brief them separately before the shooters meeting, and pair them with someone for the first stage. A new shooter who has a good day brings two friends. One who gets disqualified in confusion and goes home embarrassed never comes back.
Reshoots are handled inconsistently
Agree the process before the match: who authorises a reshoot, when it happens, and how it is recorded. Then apply it the same way every time. Inconsistency here is what people remember about a match, long after they have forgotten their own score.
There is no medical plan
Name the first aider. Know where the kit is. Write down the range's actual street address and gate code for the emergency call — in the moment, nobody can recall either. Say all three at the shooters meeting.
Teardown is left to whoever is still standing
Shooters leave after their last stage unless you ask them not to. Announce at the shooters meeting that teardown is part of the match and name the crew. Ten people take twenty minutes. Three people take two hours.
After the match
- Publish results the same day. Momentum matters more than perfection — a result posted that evening gets read; one posted on Wednesday does not.
- Ask the Range Officers what broke. They know things the Match Director never sees, and they will only tell you if you ask within a day or two.
- Write down what you would change. You will not remember by the next match. A five-line note is enough.
- Thank the crew publicly. Your setup crew is the reason there was a match, and they are the people you need again in six weeks.
A first match does not need to be impressive. It needs to start on time, be safe, produce results people trust, and end with a crew who would do it again. Everything else is something you get to build later.
Where Striker fits
Striker handles the parts of this that are administration rather than judgement: registration, squadding, stage briefings, score entry at the stage, and results published the same day. Scoring works without a signal in the bay and syncs when the device reconnects. Running matches is free — see pricing — and if you are organising your first one, we will help you run it.