I’m sure a ton of people are letting their memberships expire for the same reasons as me. In 2019 I was shooting a match a month paying 175$ per thousand for 9mm. 2 kids, god knows how much inflation, and increasing raw material costs have driven up the cost of living and ammo and 250-275$ per thousand is enough to cut me back maybe a match every quarter. No point being a member I’m not progressing
It's the same here in Finland for me. 194e/1k to 290e/1k. Gas, hotels, restaurants everything costing bunch more. Have to make choices and I practice way way less than before and just try have fun at the few matches I shoot.
I think I’ll add that think back to when you first started. You looked around at other shooters, they were generally older. Now look around at your last match, how many younger shooters are there? I think the price to play has certainly gone up at all shooting sports which has an impact. But the shooters themselves have grown older. Now they have kids, maybe the older competitors retired, or they can’t shoot anymore due to cost or health.
Same here, hard to justify the membership cost if improving in the sport is just getting more and more expensive. Additionally, my local club was doing all their annual classifiers at once for 2020 and 2021. If you missed that one day of the year, no classifiers for you til the next shooting season. Now they're doing classifiers USUALLY, which always seems to be whenever I'm not attending.
Left the sport and the org as well for several reasons, including the frustration with the board. Currently dedicating those resources to bullseye. USPSA local matches were a 6-hour day with 75 seconds of actual time on the gun. Seven to eight chances to draw the gun, 12-24 reloads. Basically, I was paying $20-25 to go stand around with an unloaded Batman belt, put stickers on cardboard, and peer pressure lazy old guys into putting stickers on cardboard. Bullseye is also a six hour day, but nearly 1/3 of that time is time on the gun, shooting for record. The CMP is a squared-away, shooter focused organization. Nice change of pace from hoser stages and sprinting on loose gravel.
I let my membership lapse. I didn't shoot as much and now focused on my kids shooting steel challenge. Especially after the stuff with you and Mr Berry sort of lifted the veil for me on the politics of USPSA
We have had 3 clubs in my area all but stop doing any USPSA monthly matches. 1 of those is doing some matches here and there, but not every month. The lack of volunteers and reloading supplies has had the greatest impact, in my opinion. The main group of guys I regularly shot with have stopped shooting matches too. These guys were all M's and GM's, so serious shooters. I think once primers are back to a reasonable price and availability we will see some guys coming back, assuming they don't find some other way to burn their money.
I have seen I have seen several Colorado clubs start shooting "outlaw" pistol matches, some using a new rule set and a different target. Heard a rumor that USPSA had told a club that could not use copyrighted targets in an outlaw match (which is utter nonsense).
Copyrighted? Thats laughable. If they got money from every “USPSA” target sold they would have aa massive financial budget. They are full of it and try to scare people…guess what, it wont work.
The targets themselves are not property of USPSA but instead they are property of the company that makes the targets. Apparently advertising your match as a “USPA style” or using a “USPSA style rule set” is something that they might consider a copyright infringement. How do I know? This year I became the MD of my clubs local pistol match. The match has always been described to me as USPSA style, so I included that verbage in my description on Practiscore. When building my third match I accidentally chose the USPSA tag under the “affiliation” column. a dude who has never been to our club before showed up at that match and had a shit ton of questions for me. Turns out he was kind of a mole for USPSA. He said he was a longtime USPSA shooter who recently moved to the area and noticed what I had written on PractiScore and was curious so he contacted USPSA to ask about my clubs affiliation. When he found out that we were not affiliated, he was told by USPSA to come and check out the situation, report back to see if we were trying to “ unlawfuly use USPSA copyrighted information, such as rulebook” he divulged this to me after the match, because I was super nice to him and inviting and trying to get him to join/shoot with our club as a new shooter who I’ve never seen before. I told him we will remain an outlaw hit-factor style match and I have since stricken anything that mentions USPSA from all of our documents. He was trying to talk me into joining the association, saying that he would help our club get “up to par”. No thanks. He said he probably won’t come sit with us anymore then. OK 🤷🏻♂️. We have a solid membership and sell out almost every match. We still have fun and improve our skills without the stringent rule set
@@LiveEazy even the idea that it is an infringement of copyright to "use" their rules is dubious. But they cannot restrict use of the targets if purchased from a licensed manufacturer. The First Sale doctrine applies. Their best argument is around USPSA as it's a trademark.
Had to be a member for a year to vote. I joined in Jan and was not able to vote. Not sure if this is a new requirement or an old rule that has always been there so someone is not able to stack deck to get a vote in their favor
I dropped my membership after your ban. Not able to shoot right now anyways, but decided to rejoin just to hopefully help vote some decent people in when I'm eligible again.
I let my membership lapse this year precisely because of all the BS that is going on with the club. I told Matt Hopkins why when he came to RBGC for a match earlier this summer asking for petition signatures.
USPSA continues to become more distasteful in their administration of the sport and to demonstrate they are focusing their effort in the wrong place. They appear to act more like our autocratic federal agencies of our current executive branch...dysfunctional. Who wants to be associated with that mess? Having served a career in the 03 career field (MOS's) of the Marine Corps and deployed six times on actual combat deployment, I've done my share of running and gunning where the targets shoot back...enough to last a life time. I'd rater go out on my land and compete against my timer these days.
