APSC Stage Director Procedure

Introduction

This Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) guides Stage Directors (SDs) of the Austin Practical Shooting Club through designing or sourcing a stage, building it on match day, validating it, and getting it signed off before the first shooter steps to the line.

A Stage Director owns one bay. Everything in it – the design, the build, the Written Stage Briefing, and the condition it is in when the last squad walks away – is yours. The Match Director runs the match; the Range Master owns range-wide safety and signs off on your stage. You are the person who knows where every bullet on your bay is going.

The term “bulletproofing” comes from the practice of designing, building, and running a stage so that it survives an entire match. A stage that has to be rebuilt at squad three costs the match its schedule and costs the club its credibility. Most of this document exists to prevent that.

Before Match Day

Stage Design or Selection

Whether you draw the stage yourself or source it from a book, a website, or another club, you are responsible for what it becomes on the ground. Sourcing a stage is not a defense; the diagram is a proposal, and the bay decides.

Course type and round count – Short courses require 1 to 12 rounds, medium courses 13 to 20, long courses 21 or more (Rule 1.2.1). Confirm your design lands cleanly in one category.
The eight-hit rule – No course may require more than 8 scoring hits from any single location or view, and no course may allow a competitor to shoot every target from a single location or view (Rules 1.2.1.1 through 1.2.1.3). “Location” and “view” have specific definitions in the glossary (Appendix A3); read them if you are close to the line.
Freestyle – Competitors must be allowed to solve the problem their own way and to engage targets as and when visible (Rule 1.1.5). Do not dictate position, stance, or reloads. Use walls and barriers to compel movement instead of using stage procedure to require it. Level I matches have limited latitude here for short and medium courses (Rule 1.1.5.1) – long courses do not.
Buildability – Confirm the stage can actually be built in the bay you are assigned with the props APSC owns. A diagram requiring props we do not have is not a stage, and match morning is a bad time to discover that.
Where do the bullets go? – Before anything else, sketch every shooting position and ask where a round goes if it misses, if it passes through the target, and if the shooter is 6’4″ instead of 5’6″. If you cannot answer that on paper, the stage is not ready to build.

Arriving at Your Bay

Arrive early enough that you are not the reason the match starts late. 8:00 AM is the stage setup start time. If your stage needs the RM to walk it and you are still setting steel at new-shooter time, you have failed the match before it started.

Get eyes on the bay before you unload. Note the berm condition, the ground surface, standing water or mud, and anything left behind from the last match.

Building the Stage

Walls, Barriers and Alignment

Walls should be as plumb as you can get them. This is not craftsmanship for its own sake – whenever a wall edge serves as a reference for a target array, a shooting area, or a port, a tilted or racked wall changes how much target a shooter sees, and it changes it differently depending on the shooter’s height. That is how you end up arguing about hard-cover hits and shoot-throughs at squad four.

Anchor everything. Stake or otherwise secure every wall and prop. Build on the assumption that at some point in the match a competitor will stumble and fall into it at speed. A prop that collapses under a shooter is both an injury risk and a muzzle-direction problem, and mid-match reconstruction is rarely practical.
Zip-tie adjoining walls together wherever a seam or gap could create an unintended view of a target. Walls drift apart over a day of use; a tie holds the line.
Barrels must be staked or bungeed to each other so wind does not lay them over. A blown-over barrel mid-squad is range equipment failure and a reshoot.
Barrier height and hard cover – Unless the Written Stage Briefing says otherwise, any wall, vision barrier, barrel, or snow-fence construct 5’9″ or taller is treated as extending from ground to infinity. Anything under 5’9″ extends from ground to the height built. Any barrier under 5’9″ that you intend to extend to infinity must be marked accordingly (Rule 2.2.3.2).
All barriers are hard cover and represent a solid plane unless designated soft cover in the WSB (Rules 2.2.3.3, 9.1.6). Shots may only be fired through designated ports or openings.
Supports don’t exist. Barrier and platform supports are deemed non-existent and may not be used for support while firing (Rule 2.2.3.4). They still have to hold the wall up.

Fault Lines and Shooting Areas

Uprange fault lines should be a minimum of 3 feet long and, unless the WSB says otherwise, are deemed to extend rearward to infinity (Rule 2.2.1.3).
Off-limits lines must be at least 2 feet high and 2 feet from any fault line, delineated with rope or caution tape, and their presence and location must be identified in the WSB (Rule 2.2.1.5).

Trip Hazards

Bracing has to be done intelligently. A brace is only useful if it does not put a competitor or RO on the ground. Angled door braces set directly in a travel path have caused serious falls.

Look specifically for low braces, knee-knockers, and doorjambs anywhere near the path a shooter or RO will take at speed. Either move them, steer competitors away from them with fault lines or barriers, or mark them clearly enough to be obvious during movement.

Targets and Steel

Managing Bullet Impact – the ARC Hard Stops

Austin Rifle Club does not permit rounds leaving the bay. This is the constraint that outranks everything else in your stage design. Two failure modes account for nearly all of it:

No shots over the berm. Check this at the height of the tallest shooter who will shoot your stage, not your own. Stand tall at every shooting position, including anywhere a competitor might get elevated on a platform or prop, and confirm that a round on target – or over it – buries in the berm.
No ground strikes. A common cause is poor use of bay depth: the stage is set deep in the bay with targets set high, rounds pass cleanly through the cardboard, strike the dirt short of the berm, and ricochet out. Every impact should be directed into the backstop or the lower half of a side berm. Where a low-angle impact is genuinely unavoidable, trap it – sandbags, piled dirt, old carpet. If you cannot trap it, redesign the array. ARC does not accept ground strikes, and neither do we.

Targets must be arranged so that engaging them on an “as and when visible” basis does not push a competitor to breach safe angles of fire (Rule 2.1.4).

The 180

No target may be visible beyond the 180 from anywhere inside the shooting area. Walk this at the edges of your shooting areas and fault lines, not down the comfortable middle – competitors will find the corner you did not check.

Steel Placement

Distance: Competitors and Match Officials must maintain a minimum of 23 feet from metal targets and metal hard cover while they are being shot. Where fault lines are used to limit the approach, they must sit at least 26 feet back, so a competitor can inadvertently fault the line and still be outside the 23-foot minimum (Rule 2.1.3). The same care applies to metal props in the line of fire – activator hardware, swinger splash guards, and steel framing all send fragments back.
Angle: Steel should be as square as possible to the shooter from the engagement position. Where the angle must vary because of the design, err toward keeping the steel parallel to the backstop. Steel set perpendicular to the berm throws splatter back toward shooters, staff, and spectators.
Position: Keep steel at or close to the berm so impacts and splatter go into dirt.
Proximity to cardboard: Where cardboard and steel sit close together, take care to minimize splatter risk to the paper (Rule 2.1.8.2).

Poppers

Level and anchor them. Poppers on a slope or on soft ground are unstable, drift out of calibration, and blow over. Level the popper and anchor it with landscaping spikes, sandbags, or both. The location and foundation must be prepared for consistent operation across the whole match (Rule 2.1.8.3). Effort here is repaid every squad.
Stop the rocking. Rocking happens when the tire or sandbag behind a popper is set too close: the popper falls, hits it, rebounds, and works the base loose no matter how well it is spiked. Space it so the top of the popper contacts the tire and stops dead, with no bounce. If there is any rebound, move the tire until there isn’t.
Calibration zone: At least 50% of the calibration zone (100% for mini poppers) must be available at some point in the course of fire (Rule 4.3.1.5).

Paint

Full-face repaint before the match begins. Every scoring popper, plate, and metal target gets its entire front painted.
Single color, preferably white. Never black, red, or green (Rule 4.1.2.2).
Metal no-shoots must be a single, unique color that is different from scoring targets and consistent for the whole match (Rule 4.1.3).
During the match, metal scoring targets that are hit must be painted after each competitor (Rule 4.3.1.7). Level I matches are encouraged but not required to do so (Rule 4.3.1.7.1) – but a popper that is not repainted between shooters can be challenged for calibration. Paint it.

Target Placement and Reset

Mark target locations on the stands, and mark stand locations on the ground, so the stage resets identically all day (Rule 2.1.8.1). The last shooter must face the same stage as the first.
Take care with cardboard placement to prevent shoot-throughs (Rule 2.1.8).
Static scoring cardboard targets must not be presented at more than approximately 45 degrees from vertical. No-shoots may be at any angle (Rule 2.1.8.4).
Stake activators, cables, and any supporting equipment.

The Written Stage Briefing

The WSB is the stage. Everything else is scenery.

A Written Stage Briefing approved by the Range Master must be posted at the bay before the match begins (Rule 3.2.1). It takes precedence over anything published in advance, and it must contain, at minimum:

Scoring method
Targets – type and number
Minimum number of rounds
Firearm ready condition
Start position
Time starts – audible or visual signal
Procedure (absent a strong-hand or weak-hand stipulation, the stage is freestyle)

Off-limits lines, if you used any, must be identified in the WSB (Rule 2.2.1.5). Any target that must be activated before being engaged must be specified in the WSB (Rule 2.1.8.5.1).

The WSB must comply with current USPSA rules (Rule 3.2.5). Print it, post it, and make it legible from arm’s length in the sun.

Validation – Walk Your Own Stage

Do this once the stage is fully built, not from the diagram. The diagram is what you meant. The bay is what you did.

Count it. Walk the stage and physically count what is on the ground: scoring cardboard, no-shoots, steel, and the minimum round count. It must match the WSB exactly. When it doesn’t, fix one or the other – but they leave your hands matching.
Walk the corners. Every shooting position, at the edges of every shooting area. Check the 180, check for targets exposed early through see-through walls, check for shoot-throughs.
Walk it tall and walk it short. Get someone tall and someone short to stand where competitors will stand. Confirm that every target is visible to both and that the exposure is the same.
Function it. Run every activator and moving target several times. Drop every popper and confirm it stays down. If it rocks, fix it now.
Push on it. Lean on the walls. Shove the barrels. Whatever fails now would have failed at squad three.

Range Master Sign-Off

When your stage is built and validated, the Range Master walks it and signs off. No stage goes live without it.

Safety considerations in the design and physical construction of any course of fire are subject to the Range Master’s approval (Rule 2.1.1), and the WSB must be RM-approved (Rule 3.2.1). Have the stage genuinely finished when you call for the walk – not “finished except for the steel.”

Any modification after sign-off must be approved by the Range Master in advance (Rule 2.3.1). Physical changes to a published course of fire should be completed before the stage begins. If you move a target at squad two because someone found a problem, that is an RM conversation, not a Stage Director decision.

During the Match

Brief your stage. When the Match Director asks stage directors for anything specific to call out at the shooter briefing, this is your moment. Use it.
Hold the reset standard. Targets go back on their marks. Steel gets painted. Props go back where they were. Consistency is what we owe every competitor who shoots after the first one.
Fix problems immediately – and if the fix changes the stage, get the RM (Rule 2.3.1).
Watch for drift. Walls rack, stakes work loose, tires migrate. Walk your stage between squads.

Conclusion

A bulletproofed stage is not luck, nor is it heroics at squad three. It is a set of unglamorous decisions made before the first shooter arrives: the wall was staked, the popper was leveled, the tire was moved back six inches, someone counted the targets against the WSB, and the Range Master walked it and signed.

Stage Directors are why APSC matches run. Thank you for taking a bay.