An AR-15 competition tests one thing a range session can’t: whether you and the rifle you already own hold up when a buzzer is running and your squad is watching. That was the lesson of the Faces of Freedom Challenge, an America’s Rifle Challenge match held August 1, 2026, at the Pete Lien and Sons Shooting Sports Complex just outside Rapid City, South Dakota.
After the match, 360 Precision founder Dan Cogan sat down with match director Mike Kusaka and Chad Barber, who is working on the ARC program’s training course and pistol challenge, to talk through what worked, what shooters learned, and what comes next.
What Is the America’s Rifle Challenge?
The America’s Rifle Challenge (ARC) is a rifle match built around the rifle you already have in your closet. In Chad’s words, that is “the biggest thing” that sets it apart from other shooting sports.
The Rapid City match was the first real year of ARC in its current format. On Saturday, competitors shot four stages of Level One and four stages of Level Two. The field ran from sponsored shooters all the way down to people shooting their first match, and everyone shot both levels that day.
If you want the background on how the program is structured, our preview of the ARC Challenge covers it from before the match.
What Do You Need to Shoot an AR-15 Competition?
The list is short. According to Chad, if you have these, you can shoot the match:
- A rifle with a good optic or a good zero: iron sights, a fixed or variable power scope, or a red dot
- A sling
- An empty chamber indicator
- 100 rounds
- At least four magazines (Chad jokes that everybody who owns a rifle already has four, and should have a dozen)
A rimfire rifle is allowed too. The point is to walk in with the skills and the AR-15 or semi-auto rifle you already have and perform in a low-stress environment. You’re shooting with friends, and as Chad put it, if they’re not your friends when you arrive, they will be by the end of the day.
Level One or Level Two: Where Should You Start?
It depends on your experience. Chad’s guidance is that shooters with a background in action sports, such as IDPA, USPSA, or multi-gun, who understand how to take commands from a range safety officer should be able to jump right into Level Two. If you’re new to competition or still building skill with your rifle, Level One is the recommended starting point. (If you’ve never shot any match, our piece on match etiquette and how to avoid a bad reputation at shooting matches covers the other side of showing up.)
Don’t mistake Level One for a gimme. According to Chad, nobody has cleaned it yet. It covers the practical basics you should be able to do with a rifle:
- Prone
- Sitting
- Kneeling
- Standing offhand
- Shooting from a barricade
What adds the pressure is the buzzer, plus the eight or nine people in your squad watching you hit or miss the steel. Chad’s point is that you should be able to call your shot the moment you break it. If you’re waiting for the ring and it doesn’t come, it gets into your head as you move to the next position on the barricade.
One first-timer at Rapid City showed how the format works for new shooters. He was in the National Guard and had some experience with his rifle there, but this was his first competition ever. He started with Level One, then shot all of the Level Two stages. That night his fiancée came into town, and the next day he brought her back for the training session, where she shot a few stages. As Chad put it, that’s two brand new competitors hooked on the sport.
Why the positions matter off the range
The barricade itself isn’t the point. As Dan recalled Chad saying, what you learn is how to engage from all the different heights you might find in the real world, like shooting off a car. Chad compared it to The Karate Kid, where Daniel didn’t know what all that waxing and painting was training him for. After working barricade positions, he went outside and started measuring the height of his truck, his lawn mower, trees, rocks, and his porch, then indoors to the bed, dresser, nightstands, and end tables. Anything at those heights becomes a rest, whether the purpose is defensive, sporting, or hunting.
His caveat: if you don’t have the fundamentals of marksmanship down, no gadget you buy will help. (For more on that foundation, see our piece on natural point of aim and body position.)
Why Compete? The Buzzer Is the Point
Competition gives you a regular way to train under pressure. Dan’s view is that besides CQB courses, a match is one of the ways you can regularly practice your skills with adrenaline and stress in the mix, because the buzzer puts them there. Level One stays basic but still adds that pressure.
It also tests your gear and your maintenance. Is your rifle being maintained? Are your skills? Chad’s answer is that there’s no better way to quantify it than comparing your scores. His suggestion is that everybody keep some kind of journal to track it: are you getting faster, and are you getting more accurate?
Matches also tell you whether a change actually worked. If you changed barrel length, added an accessory or part, swapped a grip, or moved your stock, a stage will show whether it works for you.
That matters even more for a rifle that gets shared at home. If one rifle is the household’s home defense rifle, a match shows which positions and which optic work for both of you. Chad’s wife, for example, prefers a red dot. When she looks through a magnified optic, she gets a disorienting effect, so her rifle runs a red dot and a suppressor.
What the 300-Yard Stage Taught Shooters About Red Dots
Several shooters found out that an unmagnified 6 MOA red dot isn’t as great at 300 yards as they expected. At that distance the dot can be big enough to cover the target, where a 1 MOA dot would not.
One competitor, a former SEAL, summed it up after the match. He hadn’t shot from kneeling in years, probably decades. And the dot that worked so well up close looked huge on the 300-yard targets.
From talking with competitors afterward, Mike doesn’t think anyone walked off that stage deciding they’d never shoot again. The takeaway from competitors was practical: to shoot at that distance, they’d need a magnifier, a smaller dot, or a scope with backup optics for close work. Dan’s point is that this is exactly what a match is for. A setup that works great out to 100 yards might stop working at longer distances, and you may not know until you try. A 1 MOA dot with a magnifier might be the better solution.
Suppressors got a similar rethink. Mike talked to a couple of shooters who had run them. On a stage built from the cowboy action shooters’ “Main Street” fronts, shooters moved from window to doorway to window. Their reaction: they’re taking it off. The extra five or six inches on the end of the barrel meant more time on every transition, or standing farther back and taking a longer shot.
As Mike put it, quoting Mike Tyson: everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. In competition, the buzzer is the punch.
How Do You Use Par Time Without Wasting It?
The panel’s answer: when a stage gives you a fixed window to get your hits, the time is there to be used, and speed matters most on the stage where time is added to your score. They came back to this point more than once.
Level One: 45 seconds per position, and nobody used it all
One Level One stage gives you 45 seconds per position (prone, kneeling, sitting, and standing) to fire 10 rounds. Running that stage, Mike had to smile: in group after group, everyone finished shooting and then stood there for another 20 seconds. That was time they could have spent on an extra breath or a cleaner trigger press.
Mike grew up shooting smallbore three- and four-position, and his coach hammered one rule: use every bit of time you have. Dan agreed from his PRS experience. He’d rather make six clean impacts than rip off 10 shots and get four, because you don’t get points for misses. His shorthand: you can’t miss fast enough to win.
The clock in your head is also unreliable. Dan has run out of time thinking he had plenty left, and he’s rushed a final shot when he still had 10 seconds to spare.
Stage Four: where time actually counts
According to Chad, stage four of Level One is where speed and accuracy both matter. It is the only stage that adds time to your score, with a 90-second par time. Some shooters took too long and hit the par time. Others finished in 45 seconds without getting their 12 hits, leaving time on the table they could have used.
Where do you make up time, then? Dan’s answer is transitions and target acquisition, not the shot itself. The faster you move between targets and find the next one, the more time you have to slow down and make each shot count.
Movement is its own skill, and there are action shooting classes built entirely around it. On the Buffalo stage at Rapid City, some competitors took 10 steps inside a small shooting box. Gordon and Randy, who talked about this in the class they ran, looked at the same stage and planned three steps: engage right, cut left, drop to center, with just one over-the-shoulder transition. That plan saved them a lot of time.
Dan’s advice for building this sense of timing is simple: practice and experience. Shoot Level One a couple of times, get used to the flow, and let repetition build your strategy.
Inside the Match: The Venue, the Stages, and the Setup
The Pete Lien and Sons Shooting Sports Complex far exceeded expectations, even for a team that had seen it on camera and planned it in meetings. Dan called it phenomenal, and it was his first time there.
Pete Lien and Sons Shooting Sports Complex
The facility had its official grand opening on November 8, 2025, so it was less than nine months old at match time. It was built from the ground up for events, training, and programs. It includes:
- A public range with bays out to 300 yards, open to the public
- Skeet and trap in the members area
- A 1,200-yard long range
- A north range with 17 bays (by Dan’s count)
- A 360-degree bay that is 300 yards long and lit
The details stood out as much as the size. There are proper vault restrooms instead of rented portable toilets, safe areas with concrete walls and red lines, a bench to set your gear on, and proper storage containers. Nearly every piece of steel in both Level One and Level Two had a hit flasher on it, except the knockdown steel, which Mike noted you won’t find at most places.
The people made it work too. The volunteer crew were all government employees, and Chad described them as phenomenal, with a great attitude, going to get whatever was needed. Dan, as a business owner with his own staff, said the whole experience was wonderful from his end.
Stages with local flavor
Level Two had personality. The 300-yard stage used Wile E. Coyote and Acme props. The motorcycle stage was a nod to Sturgis, with bike week just a week away. Each stage had enough movement, cover, and position changes to make shooters think through a strategy.
The local shooting community pitched in. Prairie Thunder, the local USPSA group, helped a great deal, and the cowboy action shooters let the match use their stages and building fronts for one of the stages. Mike said the complex encourages that kind of sharing: if one group buys steel or builds walls, both groups can use it.
Planning a Trip to Rapid City for a Match
If you travel for a match here, there’s more to see than the range. Dan found the city phenomenal, the restaurants and downtown great, and everything close: the range was about 20 minutes from the hotel, and Custer and Mount Rushmore were each about 20 minutes away.
Range days are long. During setup the crew worked from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Chad didn’t want to miss Mount Rushmore, so he and a friend left the hotel at 4:30 a.m., were the second car in the lot, and watched the sunrise over the monument before heading back through Keystone by 6:30 to start the day. Dan’s group took the same advice on Sunday and pulled in at 4:58 a.m., the first ones there.
Chad also made it out to the Badlands and to Custer, where he saw the donkeys and the buffalo. He says he could have spent six hours watching the prairie dogs through a spotting scope.
It was hot. The rental truck’s thermometer read 109 degrees (one of the panel insists it was 102), but the low humidity kept it tolerable. Chad’s checklist lesson: bring chapstick and sunscreen, and use both. He skipped them on setup day and paid for it.
The day after the match was worth sticking around for too. That day, a crew from another team ran a clinic for anyone who wanted to come back, and a few people who had only watched on Saturday joined in.
What the Match Director Would Change
One of Mike’s bigger fixes is less walking. On the longer bays, intermediate cardboard targets meant long walks downrange to paste them. Next time he’d concentrate the cardboard closer, or use reduced-size targets even closer, while keeping the steel out at distance. He would also add more cover on the targets in a few places.
Some of what worked is worth borrowing. For Level One, Mike and Bruce set up two bays so squads could stay together. Shooting off the barricade at the steel is one shooter at a time, which slows things down, so at that point they moved half of each group to the second bay. That sped things up and kept Level One on pace with Level Two.
Squadding took some thought. Mike and Bruce didn’t know everyone’s skill level, so they balanced each squad by division (open, limited, and stock) so that no squad was all open guns. Their assumption was that inexperienced shooters most likely weren’t running open guns, so balancing divisions probably spread out skill levels too. Learning ran both ways across the squads. First-timers watched pros, and some pros with pistol, lever gun, or shotgun backgrounds picked up new approaches on the fencing and barricades. Chad believes some stages also used reduced-size targets, about 9 by 15 inches instead of 18 by 30, which challenged people even up close.
The match was deliberately not extravagant. Chad described small, easy details that still built in plenty of challenge “without having to build the Taj Mahal,” which makes it easier for other clubs to picture running one. Setup ran in waves: one crew dropped everything off, another laid it out, and a third came through to brand it. Chad’s list for match directors covers pre-staging, modular walls, being able to change things on the fly, and having extra equipment laid out.
Difficulty was a deliberate choice. Mike’s goal was a match that was competitive, interesting, fun, and hard enough to be a challenge, but not so hard that newer shooters would be discouraged from coming back. He thinks they hit that. There’s nothing worse, he said, than a match where only the stage designer does well. Chad’s joke: most of the time, the designer blows his own stage from overthinking it.
With only four Level Two stages, building “separator” stages (the ones where top shooters pull away from the field) is harder than at a 10- or 20-stage match, Dan pointed out. As more people shoot ARC, Mike says they might raise the difficulty, possibly with bobbers or activators.
Dan’s broader lesson for anyone thinking about running a match: in his view, the best match directors always ask what they could have done better, and they ask competitors too, because competitors see things the director can’t. And people want to be a match director until they are one.
What’s Next for ARC: A Pistol Challenge and More Local Matches
ARC is building a sister program, the America’s Pistol Challenge. According to Chad, the plan is to tease it at SHOT Show and fully release it by the NRA Annual Meetings. The hope is that by June, the Rapid City facility will host an America’s Pistol Challenge Level One, an ARC Level One, and a two-gun event blending rifle and pistol. A Level One portion usually runs about a two-hour relay.
The pistol challenge is meant for clubs across the country, not just this venue. Level One pistol will max out at 25 yards. Chad wanted 50 to better test marksmanship, but more ranges have 25-yard bays. Level Two pistol will add knockdown steel and some scenario-based elements.
A training course is coming too. It’s a one-day class: two hours in the classroom and six hours on the range, with four hours of drills that break down each of the four Level One stages, then the full match shot for score. Chad describes the pace as crawl, walk, run. It will be offered at clubs whose instructors sign up to present it, and if there’s none near you, Chad’s suggestion is to start asking your club. The goal is that you can then show up to monthly matches with confidence.
In Rapid City, Mike’s team had one last big event on the calendar, and after that, if the season follows its usual pattern, more introductory matches. The Black Hills shelter the area, which Mike calls the “banana belt” of the western U.S., so winters are usually mild enough to keep shooting most of the season. Results from the Faces of Freedom Challenge are on PractiScore.
America’s Rifle Challenge FAQ
According to Chad Barber, you need a rifle with a good optic or a good zero (iron sights, a fixed or variable scope, or a red dot), a sling, an empty chamber indicator, 100 rounds, and at least four magazines. The idea behind the America’s Rifle Challenge is that you can shoot it with the rifle you already own.
Yes. Chad Barber confirmed that you can use a rimfire rifle. The format is built so that shooters can walk in with the skills and the rifle they already have and compete in a low-stress environment alongside their friends.
It depends on your experience. Shooters with an action-sports background, such as IDPA, USPSA, or multi-gun, who know how to take commands from a range safety officer should be able to start at Level Two. If you’re new to competition, Level One is the recommended starting point. It isn’t a gimme, though: according to Chad, nobody has cleaned Level One yet.
At the Rapid City match, several shooters found that an unmagnified 6 MOA dot covered too much of the target at 300 yards. Competitors came away planning for a magnifier, a smaller dot, or a scope with backup optics for close work. Dan Cogan’s view is that a 1 MOA dot with a magnifier might be the better solution.
Level One covers practical positional basics: prone, sitting, kneeling, standing offhand, and shooting from a barricade. At the Rapid City match, Level Two stages added movement, cover, and theme props, and one stage was shot on the 300-yard range. Competitors shot four stages of each level on the same day.
A one-day course is being released. It includes two hours in the classroom and six hours on the range, with four hours of drills breaking down each Level One stage, followed by shooting the match for score. It will be offered at clubs whose instructors sign up to present it.
On one Level One stage you get 45 seconds per position to fire 10 rounds, and at Rapid City, every group finished early and waited out the clock instead of using the full time. According to Chad, stage four is the only Level One stage that adds time to your score, with a 90-second par time.
It’s in development. According to Chad, the plan is to tease it at SHOT Show and fully release it by the NRA Annual Meetings. Level One pistol will max out at 25 yards so more ranges can host it, and Level Two will add knockdown steel and scenario-based elements.
Questions About Your AR-15 Setup? Talk to 360 Precision
A match will tell you fast whether your optic, barrel, or stock setup is working for you. If your first AR-15 competition left you with questions about your rifle, reach out to the 360 Precision team and talk it through.
Related Reading
- The Complete Competitive Shooter’s Ruck Sack Guide: Essential Gear Breakdown
- Joe Gentile: The Biggest Mistakes New Shooters Make and How to Avoid Them
- SWAT Sniper Reveals What Most Shooters Get Wrong
- What Goes Into a PRS Rifle Build
Everything above reflects the personal setups and opinions of the shooters in this video and is provided for general information only. It is not instruction, and it is not a substitute for safe firearm handling, the rules of your range, or the rulebook of the match you are shooting. Always confirm the legal status of suppressors and any other regulated component in your jurisdiction.
