Shooting Sports on TV

With biathlete Lanny Barnes getting ready for her first Olympic run, my pal Paul Erhardt decided it was a good time to stir the old shooting sports pot with an excellent “Between the Berms” column in The Shooting Wire basically outlining how scoring systems are, in a sense, holding the shooting sports back:

In order to tell the story of a sport and a competition you have to tell the story through scoring.
Think of it this way. Imagine watching a baseball game where the scoring isn’t provided until the last batter is out. That’s kinda how the shooting sports approach scoring.
What needs to happen is the shooting sports have to invest in the infrastructure of scoring beyond a freshly sharpened pencil and neatly printed two-part carbonless score sheet.

Kevin Creighton from Misfires & Light Strikes piled on at DRTV (incidentally, the very first post for our Guest Blogger program):

If practical shooting isn’t a spectator sport, it is, by definition not a TV sport. There’s a vicious circle going on here: Practical shooting doesn’t get TV exposure because no one goes to the matches, and no one goes to the matches because it doesn’t get TV exposure. Solve one problem, and you’ll solve the other.

Both Kevin and Paul are right, but I’m not sure they’re right enough. I’ve got more than a decade of putting the shooting sports on television, honestly with mixed success. In the last couple of years Producers John Carter, Mike Long and I have pretty much “decoded” how to do the sports on television in a way that draws the viewer into the event.

Along the way we’ve discovered an interesting “root” problem…all of us, and probably most of the people reading this blog, make the baseline assumption that the shooting sports want to grow, and increased exposure is critical to that point.

I’m not sure that’s the case. My thinking goes back to BTV* (*Before TV) when I launched a quixotic run for the presidency of the United States Practical Shooting Association (USPSA). My platform was based on growth and what we as practical shooters heeded to do to make that growth happen. I had about a bazillion accumulated miles, so I did a lot of traveling around the country to matches.

What I did not find was a consensus that growth was in fact a desirable goal. I’d say that on the balance most clubs were totally happy with the status quo and saw growth as a negative (more people, more crowded matches, increased complications in running events, etc.). That was a long time ago, but one thing I’ve seen since is that despite many and varied grow-the-sport programs over the years, not all of the practical sports have grown. I have attributed that lack of/slow growth to the unstated resistance at the grassroots level.

Anyway, Marshal and I agree that for a shooting sport to be truly successful on television, we probably need to start from scratch. That’s why TOP SHOT was such a success — it was a television event that featured shooting, as opposed to a shooting event covered by television.

Marshal notes that long-range shooting is a big television draw in Norway…120,000 spectators watching 6,000 shooters over a 7 day period — out of a country of 5 million! Here’s a link to the televised finals. Note the world class scoring system as discussed by Paul and Kevin. It exists!

Note from the editor: Here’s a video giving you an impression of the same match in Norway showing the engagement from spectators by using available technology:

Landsskytterstevnet 2013 from Cathrine Brevig Berg on Vimeo.

We’re pretty excited about the Peacemaker World Shooting Championships, which we’ll be full-court-press covering for SHOOTING GALLERY 2015. These guys are doing everything right, and I’ll go out on a limb and say this looks like the composite match we’ve all been hoping for. Even better, we’re involved on the ground floor, because we want this match to be a home run.