As I’ve alluded to in other articles, I’m spending an inordinate amount of time these days coaching an SASP team. We did great at Nationals – much better than I expected – but a lot of work went into it to get the team there.

I would say one of the biggest responsibilities for an SASP coach is guiding athletes to what equipment is going to give them the most (legal) advantage at matches. While I don’t think equipment is the end-all, be-all, I do think it will help give athletes a noticeable performance advantage. Good example: one young woman on the team who was already a fantastic shooter swapped to fiber optic sights and a better trigger, and she turned in better times on several stages. Those equipment changes didn’t make her any better or worse, but they sure helped enable faster splits across transitions. (She wound up placing third in women’s iron sight competition at Nationals, which is awesome!!!).

One critique I have of the SASP organization is that there is precious little out there in terms of writing about how to equip athletes… and I am going to try to help fill the gap. While it is tempting to simply go “use what the RFRI/O Steel Challenge folks use!”, not all of those choices work well for young adults who are not fully physically mature quite yet. Read on for some thoughts.