South Mississippi Practical Shooting

It turned out to be a pretty good day, despite the brief, but heavy rain towards the end of the match. First, we set another attendance record mark with 50 shooters competing (thanks for the support, everyone)! That eclipsed the old mark of 44 set just two months ago. Second, we welcomed back some old friends who hadn’t shot with us in quite a while. And finally, your match director managed to cobble together 6 short but fun/challenging stages that provided plenty of action but at a quicker than normal pace.

We thought we would get by without the rain that had been forecast for several days but that turned out to be wishful thinking. While at least one squad managed to finish before the serious rain cut loose, most had to endure shooting in the rain, or just getting quite damp while trying to shoot. In the end, we had to put up some new targets and we lost some paster rolls to the water, but we got all the stages shot without any significant problems. And, thankfully, no one ended up in the ditch adjacent to the road down the hill.

Many shooters used this match as a tuneup for the upcoming MS State Championship Production match (two weeks from today). This year’s format allows lots of non-Production shooters to compete in the big Production match, even though they aren’t really Production shooters. Heck, how different can minor caliber 10 round guns be from a major Limited or Open gun? That’s what at least 7 or 8 found out today. In total, there were 18 shooters in Production (the largest division), including such non-Production names as Gerwin Henn and Max Michel. After my brief stint in L10 for the state match a few weeks ago, I for one am glad to have a red dot and high cap mags to shoot. But, to each his own.

In each match, there are winners and occasionally losers. Your overall match winner today is no stranger to the top spot and he comes from the Open ranks. Congratulations to Roger Henn for the overall match win and the Open division win. The margin was almost 9% and other than a sandbagger-ish classifier, he was no lower than 3rd in all the other stages and scored 3 wins as well. In fact, he didn’t have a time that was in double digits the whole match. No one else can make that claim today. In second, was Aaron Fitzgerald, shooting just his second match in Open. Jason Welch was third overall and first in Production and not too far behind Aaron. Jason is a full time Production guy and he put on the proverbial clinic on how to shoot that type of gun. Also notable in Production was the somewhat hobbled Gerwin Henn, who was still nursing a strained quad from the L10 match a couple of weeks ago. As a regular Limited guy, he seemed to make the transition to Production pretty well and finished 4th overall, ahead of many Open shooters, proving once and for all, it isn’t the equipment, its the operator. Jamie Humphrey took top honors in Limited, while Nick Brandt took the win in Single Stack. Don Evans was first in Carry Optics, and finally, Eli Ladnier won his Poplarville debut in PCC. Congratulations to all the winners on a great performance. The stages were tempting today and some did well, while others succumbed to the temptation to speed beyond their capability.

With the huge turnout today, we also had huge help in getting everything picked up, despite the wetness from the rain. And special thanks goes to Blayne and Bryce Dupuy, along with their dad, Barrett, for helping to set up the stages on Friday. Hopefully, you know how much I appreciated that.

For the complete match results, click the score computer at the right. 

If you want the Practiscore match file to play with, you can get it here.