SierraBravo on Target Risk-aware. Prepared. Capable.
SecondWatch
Most training stops at your front door. This is the training group for everywhere else.
Concealed carry and home defense are the base — necessary, and not sufficient. SecondWatch trains security teams and individuals for active threats out in the world: the workplace, the school, the business, the sanctuary, and the crowded street where the problem doesn't hold still.
Where most introductory training ends is where this one starts.
The standard curriculum in this industry is concealed carry and home defense. It assumes a space you own, a layout you know in the dark, a small number of people you can account for by name, and a threat coming to you.
Almost nothing about a public active-threat event matches those assumptions. You are somewhere you didn't design. There are people everywhere and most of them are moving. You do not know how many threats there are. You may not be the only armed person in the building, and the others may not know who you are either.
And the problem itself is often moving — down a sidewalk, through a food court, across a parking deck, from one room to the next. A rolling, dynamic battlespace, with a crowd in it. That is a different skill set, and it is not learned by shooting a static target on a square range.
SecondWatch is where that gets trained, tested, and repeated — quarterly, in a group, with a scored standard and people who will tell you the truth about your performance.
The organizing idea
You will be in one of two conditions. We train both.
Every scenario in this program is built on a single question: do you know this place, and does this place have a plan? The answer changes almost everything about what you should do in the first thirty seconds.
Condition One · The prepared space
You know this building, and it has a plan.
Your church. Your workplace. Your school. Your business.
- You know the exits, the choke points, and where cover actually is — not where it looks like it is
- There is a written plan, and roles inside it that people have rehearsed
- You are part of a team with comms, posts, and a handoff
- Someone is in charge, and someone else takes over if that person is the casualty
- Your hardest problem is team convergence — multiple responders moving on one threat, in plainclothes, from different directions
Trained as a team.
Condition Two · The unprepared space
You are a visitor here, and nobody has a plan.
The street. The mall. The restaurant. Somebody else's building.
- You don't know the exits and you have seconds to find one
- There is no team, no radio, and no one coming for several minutes
- Everyone around you is a bystander, a witness, or a variable — and one of them may be a second threat
- Responding officers will arrive to find a person with a gun who is not in a uniform, and that person is you
- Your hardest problem is deciding whether to act at all, and everything after that is improvised off skills you already own
Trained as an individual.
Most of your life is spent in Condition Two. Most training in this industry pretends you'll be in your living room. We build the skills that transfer between the two — because under stress you will not rise to the occasion, you will default to the level of your training.
Who trains here
Teams and individuals, on the same line.
The group is deliberately mixed. Team members learn to work around strangers; individuals learn what a coordinated response looks like from the outside — which is exactly what they'll encounter in a real one.
Security teams
Churches, workplaces, schools, businesses
Volunteer safety teams and in-house response teams who have a facility to protect and people who count on them. You train together, qualify together, and get a scored team record you can hand to your board, your insurer, or your counsel.
Individuals
Anyone past the basics
You've taken the carry class. You've done home defense. You want the part nobody teaches: what to do in a building you've never seen, in a crowd, with no team and no plan — and how to not become the second problem when police arrive.
Team leads
The person who has to run it
Incident command, comms discipline, lockdown and evacuation, family reunification, the law-enforcement handoff, and the after-action review. Plus a written quarterly brief on what your team trained and what to drill before the next session.
The progression · 4 levels · 48 hours
Four levels. Two sessions each. Two years to Guardian.
One six-hour session per quarter, on the same foundational skill base SierraBravo teaches across every program — so a level earned here means the same thing it means anywhere else in the system. Twelve hours per level. You level up every six months.
Foundation
Gate: baseline qualification
The platform and the law. Grip, presentation, and the draw from how you actually dress — not a range rig. State use of force walked line by line, plus your organization's own policy and what you are not authorized to do. Discreet carry, non-verbal signals, and the shift plan: zones, posts, sightlines, handoff. Qualification shot cold on day one, so every session after this is measured against a real number.
Defender
Gate: Defender test · annual qual
Decision under time. Behavioral threat assessment and pre-attack indicators. The domestic-violence and custody-dispute problem — statistically far likelier than an ideological attacker in almost every setting we serve. De-escalation, the escort, trespass warnings. On the range: positive identification with bystanders in the frame, shoot / no-shoot under a clock, multiple threats and transitions. Force-on-force built around encounters that must not end in a shooting.
Protector
Gate: Protector test
The building and the team. Reading a space as terrain — where cover is, where drywall and furniture only look like cover, and how to work a floor plan you saw two minutes ago. Movement toward a threat while everyone else moves away from it. Shooting in an occupied room: backstop, angles, the elevated shot, round accountability. And team convergence — the most dangerous failure mode a multi-member plainclothes team has, and the one almost nobody trains.
Guardian
Gate: Guardian test · annual qual
Command, medicine, and everything after. Stop the Bleed certification — the capability you are most likely to actually use. Care under fire, casualty movement, triage for people who aren't medics. Incident command run live: lockdown, evacuation, accountability, reunification, and the law-enforcement handoff. Post-incident: the first ten minutes, the statement, the after-action. Guardians begin assisting on the line and enter the instructor track.
The group doesn't graduate and go home. Year three restarts the cycle at greater depth — same four levels, harder standards, more complex scenarios — because these are perishable skills and a certificate from two years ago protects nobody. Members who join mid-cycle complete the online onboarding module, come to whatever session is next, and shoot the qualification that day to set their baseline.
Skill domains
What actually gets trained.
Every session runs the same shape — gear and safety, classroom, range block, lunch, application and scenarios, debrief. Roughly 150 rounds a session, and force-on-force in every level from Defender on.
Moving problems
- The threat that relocates — hallway to hallway, block to block
- Shooting on the move, and knowing when not to
- 180° turn and engage
- Getting off the X in a space with no X
- Movement against the flow of a fleeing crowd
People in the way
- Positive identification with bystanders behind, beside and between
- Backstop awareness and the elevated shot
- Round accountability as a scored standard, not a slogan
- Moving a non-combatant who won't move
- The second armed civilian — who may be pointing at you
Team mechanics
- Convergence on one threat from multiple directions
- Plain-language comms and discreet signals
- Posts, zones, sightlines, shift handoff
- Incident command and succession
- Lockdown, evacuation, accountability, reunification
After the shooting stops
- Stop the Bleed — certified
- Care under fire and casualty collection
- The law-enforcement handoff, so you don't get shot by the cavalry
- The first ten minutes, statements, and the after-action
- Documentation that holds up later
The standard
A qualification you can pass and an attorney can defend.
An FBI qualification is too hard for someone who trains four days a year. "We shot a little" is indefensible in a deposition. The SecondWatch Qualification sits deliberately between the two: 30 rounds, 60 points, from concealment, on a silhouette with an 8-inch center — shot cold at your first session as a baseline, and again every year.
| Rating | Score | What it authorizes |
|---|---|---|
| Qualified | 42 / 60 | Serving armed on a team |
| Qualified — Senior | 50 / 60 | Team lead, armed response position |
| Qualified — Master | 55 / 60 | Instructor track, assistant instructor |
A team member who doesn't qualify isn't removed from the team. They move to an unarmed role — observer, greeter, comms, medical, evacuation — until they re-qualify. It's handled privately. It's a person's standing among people they see every week, not a range score.
Come often. Get tested. That's the whole method.
This is a training group, not a certificate. The point isn't to attend once and own a credential — it's to keep showing up, on a schedule, with people who will measure you honestly and tell you what slipped since last quarter.
Skill is perishable and the first things to go are the ones that matter most under stress: the draw from concealment, the decision to shoot or not, and the discipline to account for every round. Four sessions a year is the floor, not the goal. Members get range access on session days, the online library between sessions, and a 30-day dry-fire program to run at home.
Put yourself to the test while it's still practice. Everything in this program is scored, written down, and compared to your own last number — because the alternative is finding out what you can actually do on the worst day of your life.
What we get asked
Three fair questions.
"We already have an officer on site."
Keep them — they're an asset and we'll build the plan around them. But the clock that matters isn't dispatch to arrival; it's onset to first effective intervention, and only someone already in the room controls that number. A single uniformed post is also one schedule and one predictable location. That's your outer layer, not your whole program.
"Isn't this too much for volunteers?"
The standard is built for a volunteer who trains four days a year, not for a SWAT selection. And most of what this group does has nothing to do with a firearm — it's medical emergencies, a parking-lot dispute, a person in crisis, a lost child, a disruptive visitor. The gun is the least-used tool in the kit and the most trained-for. The alternative isn't "no security" — it's unmanaged security, since people in your building are already carrying with no policy and no coordination.
"I'm not on a team. Is this for me?"
Yes — and it's most of the point. You spend the majority of your week in buildings you don't control, with no team and no plan. Everything in Condition Two is trained as an individual skill, and training it alongside organized teams shows you exactly what a coordinated response looks like from the outside, which is what you'd be walking into for real.
Membership
Published pricing. No quote request.
Two ways in: pay for yourself, or have your church enroll the whole safety team on one account. Every plan carries a one-time $17.76 signup fee, and annual plans add a free range day.
Individual
$69.99 / month
Paid by you · + $17.76 one-time signup fee
- Quarterly 6-hour session
- Range access day of class
- Online training and class video
- 20% in-person course discount
- 15% friends & family discount
- Free home protection assessment
- Free range day on annual plans
- USCCA Elite membership, presented by Delta Defense
Church safety team Group rate
Group enrollment
Paid by the church · one account for the whole team
- Everything in Individual, for every member on the team
- The church buys the seats — no volunteer pays out of pocket
- Seats belong to the church, so you can substitute a member any time
- One invoice, one renewal, one point of contact
- Your whole team trains, qualifies and is scored together
- Written quarterly brief for your team lead
Why the group rate matters more than the discount. When a church buys the seats, the seats belong to the church — so when a volunteer moves or steps back you substitute someone in, they complete the online onboarding before their first session, and your program doesn't restart. Volunteer turnover is the single most common reason church safety programs quietly die, and a transferable seat is how this one survives it. Building the plan is priced separately: site assessment, emergency response plan, use-of-force policy, incident command and reunification plans, and a facilitated tabletop, delivered as an editable document library your organization owns outright. Book a consultation and we'll price your facility specifically.
Upcoming sessions
Every date, published a year ahead.
A team with next year's dates already on the calendar sends people to all four sessions. A team that gets an email six weeks out sends two. So we publish the whole cycle at once and we don't move the dates. Sessions are open to enrolled members only.
Calera, AL
Why "SecondWatch."
A watch is a shift, not a person. In every building there is already a first watch — the greeter, the receptionist, the shift lead, the teacher, the deacon. The people who notice when a car circles the lot twice or a face at the door doesn't fit the morning. That watch has been standing for as long as the building has had a front door.
We are the second watch. We don't replace anybody; we stand behind them.
"And if he shall come in the second watch, or come in the third watch, and find them so, blessed are those servants." Luke 12:38
Start here
Come to one session. Shoot the qualification cold.
You'll leave with a real number, an honest read on where you actually are, and a clear picture of what the next twelve months would build. If you're bringing a team, start with a free fifteen-minute call — no pitch, no obligation — and we'll talk through your facility and what a plan for it would involve.