Home of the Carolina Cup! With owner Frank Glover to the left – working hard the entire match.

June 20th: Saturday is the final day of shooting and the awards ceremony. The staff was onsite early again and the traditional photo of the volunteer team in matching t-shirts was taken around 7:30am.

Here are the people who host the match and make everything run smoothly, Frank and Paula Glover:

Paula Glover, who handles registration and the stats team behind her on a well deserved break.

Frank Glover handling the dirty work but still smiling!

Safety is a serious concern. Around 8am one of the RSOs wasn’t looking very well and even though he said he’d be fine, someone alerted the EMT on staff that the gentleman appeared to be in pain. The EMT asked him to sit and started asking questions.  It’s a damn good thing he did. An ambulance was called and, once assessed at the hospital, he was sent via Life Flight to Duke Hospital. Turns out he had an abdominal aneurysm and underwent surgery before lunch time. His prognosis is good. If he had been at home I have to wonder if he’d have called 911 in time.

Ambulance on site around 8am Saturday.

After the ambulance left, I wandered by to talk to the chrono team before we got busy with scores. I asked what they did and a bit about the process. They ask each shooter for 6 rounds. Two of the 6 must pass the power requirements per the IDPA rules. Note: my comment yesterday that a shooter was DQd for not making power factor was incorrect. As far as I know, no shooter was DQd for this reason.

A lower powered round will create less recoil, but may also cause the gun to malfunction. Serious competitors reload and will try to hit the sweet spot of a round that meets the minimum requirements but creates as little recoil as possible. Per wikipedia, “The power factor is calculated by multiplying bullet weight (in grains, 7,000 to the pound) by muzzle velocity (in feet per second), then dividing by 1000.”

For this match, two chronographs were used and the higher number was always selected (to favor the shooter). In the photo below, you can see the scale used to weight the bullets (lead portion of the round) and the two chronographs directly in front of the shooter (both are surrounded by a red box).

Chrono Team at the 2015 Carolina Cup

Other trivia from the last day of shooting:

• At least one RSO was wearing a kilt!
• Lunch was a choice of hamburgers, fried bologna on a bun, or hot dogs.
• Over 10,000 score sheets were entered for the match: 328 shooters with 16 stages entered twice into the scoring system for error checking purposes.
• Final scores were posted by 5:10pm Saturday.
• Dinner was served starting around 5pm. All attendees were treated to a traditional southern pig pickin’ and some of the best BBQ pork I’ve had in quite some time.

Awards started at 6pm. The volunteers (stats team, RSOs and the buggy drivers) were acknowledged as “the people who make this match possible”.  Several guns were given away (either based on skill or random drawings). The top 5 placements in each Classification/Division were awarded plaques or trophies. And the top finisher in each of several categories were announced: High Military, High Law Enforcement, High Lady, High Junior, High Senior (Age 50-64), High International, and High Distinguished Senior (65 or older).

I think that last award is pretty special. These are shooters that are no longer in their prime who are still at it, doing their best even with the issues age can deal out: bad joints, accidents that have left damage, tremors, degraded eyesight, etc. They may be fighting a losing battle as far as improving their shooting over time – but they never give up. I seriously admire that mindset and I like the fact that shooting can be a lifetime pursuit.

The final announcement of the award ceremony: There will not be a sanctioned IDPA Match next year. However the Carolina Cup will be held as usual and will be the best match Frank has to offer.