I have several friends who do the field shoots at Woody’s Match. One of them is running a stage tomorrow during a designated marksman’s (DM) match, and I’ll be there as the sun comes up to check things out for the first time. Maybe if I find the time to practice and get halfway decent I’ll enter one of these as a participant sometime… but it won’t be any time soon.

I couldn’t find any decent video of designated marksman series, but I did find some footage of a shooter tackling a course of fire in the Precision Rifle (PR) series in March.

The biggest difference between the two kinds styles of match are in distance and manpower. The DM matches are done as a two-man team out to 650 yards and your partner can coach you, where in the PR matches, you have one shooter, going it alone out to 1,000 yards.

In this stage of the March 8 precision rifle match, the shooter engages six pepper popper targets with pistol, then scrambles up the hill to engage six rifle targets. Rifle target distances from shooters right to left are: 365 yds, 300 yds, 144 yds, 204 yds (obscured from view when prone), 408 yds, and 412 yds.

You’ll note that the shooter quickly hits her pistol targets with one miss, then runs up the hill to take on all of her prone rifle targets first. She then experiences what appears to be a failure to feed after a magazine change during her transition from prone to standing. One she sorts that out, she quickly slung up and nailed the 204 yard target from the standing position on her first shot.

Yeah… I’m going to need to practice a lot not to embarrass myself at one of these.