FYI my personal opinion of shooter classification systems is that in practice there's all sorts of room for them to not end up working to the desired goal. Briefly, that year after year there will inevitably be someone mis-classified as an "Expert", who will clean up and prevent the "real" Expert shooters a chance to win their classification. Next year that person will be bumped to Master, but there's a good chance that some other "should be a Master" shooter will end up being in Expert class that year.
But, I might be wrong on that, and even so, if there are enough F-Class shooters out there that want a shooter classification system, at some point it may well be time to introduce one.
Keith, one artifact of using a range of scores to classify people is that it is actually classifying the shooter *plus* his equipment (i.e. an F/Open shooter will tend to have scores higher than an F/TR shooter, for a given skill level). Also, the "47+" figure used for Master (for example) is from the very old days of TR shooting with issue ammo; there's a good chance that these scoring bands would have to be recalibrated for F-Class. Using a system of percentiles (hey I think you're a smart enough programmer to do the "A" "B" "C" thing ;-) takes that into account and ends up producing a certain fraction of the field as Master, another fraction as Expert, and another fraction as Sharpshooter".
Glen Taylor and I discussed the classification system this past weekend as a possible circumventon of the short range ICFRA target, which will certainly be an anathema to new shooters.
I don't quite understand what you mean by "circumventing" the SR ICFRA target? Do you mean that it is a net negative to new shooters, and that a classification system might help ease the blow of a newbie shooting a 38 out of 50?
Whatever is chosen for a target system, the decision has to be made whether you want a "hard" or an "easy" target. There are good and honest arguments to be made for both.
In Target Rifle, the traditional choice has been an "easy" target system - a 2MOA bull is actually quite an easy ring to hit with slings and iron sights, almost all of the time. The good part to this is that "possibles are possible". I would argue that the bad part of an "easy" target system is that it turns the scoring into a "negative game", in that your standing in a match is essentially a result of tallying your errors (how many points did you drop?), rather than adding up your good shooting (how many points did you earn?). As you can probably tell, I am in the "hard" targets camp.
F-Class as a shooting discipline is at the extreme end of achievable accuracy - it allows very good sighting, and very good support of the rifle, and very tightly grouping rifles (even in the wind), so the nature of the game is such that at the top of the game, people are able to deliver their shots into very, very small groups on the target. And this poses a dilemma w.r.t. what the "right" F-Class target system is. If you use a system that is reasonably challenging for the people at the top of the game (and a ~1-MOA highest scoring ring seems to show itself in practice to be "tight enough to challenge even the best shooters" - F-Class shooters firing on a ~1-MOA 5-ring or 10-ring target typically get scores that are close to but not quite as high as TR shooters firing on a 2-MOA highest-scoring-ring target), you then have a target system that is *really* hard and unforgiving for shooters who are not yet at nationally-competitive skill level, or for factory rifles, or even for that matter a top-level shooter with a good rifle that is experiencing some problems. If you use an "easier" target system, you then have what might be considered an "overly easy" target system for shooters at the top, which can arguably damage the sport there; a really "easy" 5-ring ends up producing an extremely "negative scoring" sort of game.
I think before one were to worry about a classification system, one should look at why you only got 25 F-class shooters to the CFRC, with 60% being from Ontario or Quebec.
If 25 shooters constitutes an acceptable national attendance, we may as well hold "national" matches in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba too.
This is a separate issue, and to be honest one that I'm more concerned with than shooter classifications. Somehow, we need to find out if enough shooters out there actually *want* to have an annual Canadian national F-Class championships, and if so, what's the best way to put it on. Until now, it's been co-located with the national TR championships, and probably will for the next year or two anyhow, though I think there's a good chance that some developments in the works at present might open up the possibility of locating the national championships somewhere other than Connaught.
