Observation — The Watcher
The stage gives everyone the same problem. The solution depends on what you have learned to see.
Stage planning is one of those skills I thought I understood before I actually understood how much I didn’t understand. Look at the targets. Figure out where to shoot them. Decide where to reload. Don’t break the 180. Go fast. Easy. Except, like most things in competitive shooting, the more I learn about stage planning, the more complicated—and more interesting—it becomes.
I’ve started to realize that a good stage plan isn’t necessarily about finding some brilliant solution nobody else noticed. The shortest path matters. The fastest route matters. Clever target engagement matters. Reload placement matters. All of it should be considered.
But all of those things eventually have to pass through one final filter: The shooter who actually has to execute the plan. And, unfortunately, that’s me.
Sometimes the Shooting Area Isn’t a Path
At a recent match, I encountered a stage with a shooting area shaped roughly like a capital L rotated 90 degrees clockwise. (see article image)
We started just outside one end of the short leg. There were three targets available near the entry, including one requiring a fairly hard left-hand lean. A wall with a large port ran along the long section of the shooting area, with another group of targets requiring some movement within the port to see everything. At the far-right end were three more targets arranged somewhat like a mirror image of the first group.
During the walkthrough, I noticed something. One of those far-right targets could actually be seen from the starting end of the shooting area.
Aha! The first few shooters hadn’t taken it from there. I decided I would.
After the buzzer, I stepped in, engaged the targets available from the starting area—including my cleverly discovered target—and proceeded down the L-shaped shooting area. I made my reload while moving toward the port, turned the corner, worked my way through the port targets and eventually finished the remaining targets on the right.
I was even told afterward that taking that right-side target from the starting position had been a great plan. Naturally, I was feeling pretty smart. That lasted approximately one shooter.
The shooter behind me incorporated the same target into his plan. But after finishing the targets at the starting end, he stopped shooting, ran out of the shooting area diagonally across the corner of the L. Then he reentered the shooting area at the other end. Of course he did! Nothing said we had to remain inside the shooting area. We simply couldn’t fire shots while outside of it.
I had looked at the L-shaped shooting area and unconsciously decided it was also my required travel path. Once I stepped into it, apparently I had entered some sort of invisible hallway from which escape was forbidden.
The stage rules hadn’t created that hallway. I had.
His route was shorter, but that wasn’t the only advantage. We both needed to reload at essentially the same point in the stage. I performed mine while moving toward the port and negotiating a 90-degree turn. He performed his while running a relatively straight diagonal line across the corner.
I had combined movement, a reload and a direction change. He had movement and a reload.
I had to moderate my speed to do everything reliably. His reload simply happened during movement he already needed to make. He hadn’t just found a shorter route. He had found a more efficient solution to the whole problem.
The Clever Plan Isn’t Always the Good Plan
There is something satisfying about finding the stage plan nobody else sees. Sometimes it really is brilliant. Sometimes nobody else is doing it because it’s a terrible idea.
Stage planning shouldn’t become a competition to find the weirdest possible solution. If you discover something nobody else seems to have noticed, it’s worth asking whether they actually missed it—or whether they saw the same thing and rejected it.
The goal isn’t clever. The goal is efficient.
That means considering the shortest path, the fewest positions, the best target engagement order, movement, reload locations and every other opportunity the stage provides. But efficiency isn’t universal. It has to account for the shooter.
The Best Plan for Me
I prefer moving through stages from left to right whenever the stage allows it. There is no advanced competitive-shooting theory behind this. I’m just terrible at reloading while moving right to left.
When I do it under pressure, I have an annoying tendency to let my orientation creep closer to the 180 than I’d like. That means part of my attention is occupied making sure I don’t turn what should be a routine reload into a conversation with the Safety Officer. So if two plans are reasonably close in efficiency and one allows me to move left to right, I’m probably choosing that one.
I also prefer moving from uprange toward downrange whenever practical. Running back uprange while keeping the gun safely pointed downrange can require some awkward body positions. I can do it. That doesn’t mean I should voluntarily build it into my plan when another good option exists.
A better shooter may look at exactly the same stage and make different decisions. That’s okay!
The fastest theoretical way to shoot a stage is useful information. So is watching what the best shooters do. But if their plan requires skills I don’t currently possess—or asks me to perform something I’m inconsistent at—their optimal plan may not be mine. That’s not an excuse to avoid weaknesses forever. Today’s limitations should influence today’s stage plan. They don’t have to remain limitations! If I improve that right-to-left reload, a route I reject today might become the obvious choice six months from now.
Stage planning, then, requires understanding more than the stage. It requires an honest understanding of yourself.
I Start by Stealing Ideas
My walkthrough process has evolved.
And one of the first things I do is steal. Shamelessly! If I’m one of the first people into the shooting area during the walkthrough, I usually don’t try to solve everything immediately. My first trip is reconnaissance. Where are all the targets? Where can I see them? And most importantly, did I actually find all of them?
I’ll count the required shots and compare that number with the stage description. If the stage says 18 rounds and I’ve only found 16, I haven’t discovered an incredibly efficient stage plan. I’ve lost a target. That’s useful information to discover before the timer starts.
After that first walkthrough, I’ll step aside and watch other shooters. This is where the stealing begins. I’m watching where they’re stopping, what they’re seeing from different positions, how they’re moving and whether they’ve noticed something I haven’t. I’m not necessarily stealing their entire plan. Stealing an idea isn’t the same as stealing a plan.
Someone may show me a better place to engage one target even though the rest of their plan makes absolutely no sense for me.
On my next walkthrough, I’ll start looking seriously at efficiency. Where do I need to be? Which targets can I combine from one position? Where does the reload naturally fit? Which direction do I want to move?
Then I want another couple of walkthroughs to refine it. If the plan feels bad, I’ll change it. But if I make a significant change, I want at least one complete walkthrough using the new version. Otherwise I’ve created a collection of individually good ideas that I’ve never actually rehearsed together.
Was It the Shooter or the Plan?
Once people start shooting, another source of information becomes available.
Now I can see what actually happens. If someone has trouble at a particular spot, I try to determine why. Was it them? Or was it the stage?
One shooter fumbling a reload doesn’t necessarily mean the reload location was bad. A shooter can turn a perfectly reasonable plan into performance art all by himself. I’ve certainly done my part. But if several shooters enter the same position awkwardly, overrun the same opening or hesitate at the same transition, there may be something about the stage geometry causing it.
Likewise, watching someone execute a difficult movement perfectly doesn’t automatically mean I should add it to my plan. Again, the shooter matters. I’m trying to learn from what happens without blindly copying the result.
Eventually, Stop Planning
There is another danger in all this observation. At some point, you have to stop. I’ve learned this one the embarrassing way too.
At another match, I was several shooters down in the order when I realized I had spent most of the official walkthrough, loading magazines instead of actually walking the stage. Excellent use of limited resources! I then spent the time before my turn desperately trying to build a stage plan while everyone else was shooting. I moved my reload. Then I moved it back. Then I reconsidered part of the route. By the time I stepped up to shoot, I wasn’t executing a plan. I was still negotiating with myself about what the plan was.
Compare that with one of my better stages, where I had walked through my plan a bunch of times. When the timer went off, there wasn’t much left to decide. I just had to shoot.
That’s increasingly what I think a stage plan is supposed to accomplish. Make Ready isn’t where I figure out what I’m going to do. It’s where I visualize what I’ve already decided to do.
Once I have a plan I’ve rehearsed several times, my threshold for changing it becomes fairly high. If another shooter finds something that might save me a tenth of a second, I’m probably not rebuilding everything. But there are exceptions. If I discover something potentially catastrophic—a safety problem, a forgotten target, bad round-count math or something else that could destroy the stage—I’m changing the plan.
At the other extreme, sometimes someone really does find the aha solution. Then it may be worth changing. I suspect that’s what happened with the shooter behind me on that L-shaped stage. I don’t think his original plan was the route he ultimately shot. He watched me take that distant target from the starting position and apparently thought something along the lines of, Well, obviously that works! Then he did something better still. He took my idea, understood what it changed about the stage, improved upon it and executed the resulting better plan.
I had seen something the shooters before me hadn’t. He saw something I hadn’t. And now I’ll see something on future stages that I probably wouldn’t have seen before that match.
Seeing the Whole Story
That’s what stage planning is becoming for me. Not finding the trick. Not simply calculating the shortest distance between two points. Not copying the fastest shooter on the squad. It’s learning to see the whole story.
Targets. Distance. Positions. Round count. Reloads. Movement. Direction. Safety. Risk. Rules. Your strengths. Your weaknesses. And sometimes the imaginary hallway you’ve constructed because a piece of fault line looked like it ought to be a wall.
Every one of those things affects the others.
A shorter route that creates a terrible reload may not be more efficient. Eliminating a shooting position that leaves you with an unreliable hard lean may not save anything. A theoretically slower route that lets you perform several necessary tasks naturally during movement might actually produce the better stage.
And the answer can be different for two shooters standing next to each other. The stage gives us the same problem. What we see when we look at it depends on our experience, our abilities and all the mistakes we’ve already had the opportunity to make.
I’m getting better at seeing the whole stage. Apparently I just need to remember that sometimes the fastest way around a corner is not to go around the corner at all.
Observation — The Watcher
Experience doesn’t change the stage. It changes what you are able to see.