Ditch the spreadsheets & whiteboards, and end the frustration of match scoring.

A human chain passing post-it notes, bewildering spreadsheets, a queue of people staring over the shoulder of an annoyed match official squinting into a laptop screen, and of course a whiteboard that’s rarely up to date. These are the hallmarks of a practical shooting match. Matches are notoriously hard to score, and in many matches scoring errors have led to arguments or even abandoned results. It’s all too easy to miscalculate scores when the results often come in batches and hacked together spreadsheets are updated on the fly, often with formula errors. It’s frustrating for the officials, but more so for the competitors who have no idea where they place after their run. Even when electronic scoring is used, matches that average several runs or have to contend with drop scores means the scores obtained for a run have to be transferred to a spreadsheet for the competitors’ scores to be tracked.

For practical shooting matches to be truly fun to participate in, competitors and spectators need to be able to follow the twists and turns of the match in real-time. This creates more suspense and excitement, with outcomes decided on the last run in a hotly contested match. For this to work, scores need to update immediately and tight integration is needed from the course of fire to the scoreboard. But what if they were both the same, what would be possible then?

At AttackSense we’ve always thought that matches need to be interactive to bring the sport up to the main stage, and we’ve invested huge amounts of effort in making this a possibility. With version 7.0 of the AttackSense Commander software we’ve released our Matches module, available to all customers running the AttackSense target system. This allows a host to create a Match and define every element of the challenge and the scoring, defining the running order of the event and determining how repeated runs are scored. We track average, total or best runs with an ability to drop best and worst scores. We’ve added a new view to our Big Screen System to view runs by competitors and update the placement of competitors in real-time. Runs can be voided or forfeited by the range officer for infringements or equipment failures.