South Mississippi Practical Shooting

After the record setting turnout last month, it looked like we might beat that today, but the final count was a mere 44 shooters. That’s still a great turnout for us and Wayne and I greatly appreciate your support. Online registration reached at peak of 57 by last night, but we expect around 10% attrition as normal.

As you saw today, the area surrounding the range underwent some big changes. How this will affect us in the long run is yet to be determined, as there may be more logging to come. Thankfully, we had not started our plan to build bays and fix the road. Once the logging has moved on, we can begin some serious dirt work to make the range more “rangey.”

The original forecast on Friday has a real decent chance of rain on Saturday and Sunday, but that never materialized, and when the hammers started falling, the overcast sky make for a not too miserable start to the day. With four high round count, but reasonably quick stages, we zipped through and were done by around 11:30. Had it not been for the minor scoring issue, we could have been on our way by Noon.

As it was, a scoring problem resulted in not only a delay, but also the release of two rounds of incorrect scores at the range. If you downloaded the match from my iPad at the range, those scores are wrong. Here’s what happened. The score computer for squad 4 ran out of juice with 3 shooters left on their last stage (stage 3). I gave them the computer from squad 2 and set it to stage 3 for them. They then shot and scored their last three shooters on that computer. When we went to sync everything, we discovered those three shooters that were shooting stage 3 actually got scored on stage 2. Once we realized that, we moved those scores to stage 3 and resynced. Those would be the last scores released at the range. On the way home, it occurred to me that with those last three scores posted to stage 2 instead of stage 3 for the first sync, the real stage 2 scores MIGHT have been overwritten. That turned out to be the case, and once home, I figured all that out and got all the corrected scores in the right place. Fortunately and unfortunately, this resulted in several people moving in the final, final results.

Speaking of results, let’s get to it. The overall winner did not change and that means John Nguyen was our match and Open division winner, by a landslide 9.7%. In second for real was Roger Henn, followed by Gerwin Henn. George Hemstad was the one who was most adversely affected by the score problem. When we left the range, he was in 2nd overall. Once the corrections were finally applied, he dropped to 4th overall. Sorry about that, George. At least you still beat Jason!

This match featured 20 Open shooters, many of whom were in full prep mode for the MS State Open Championship in two weeks. There were 16 in Limited, with Dave Pape taking the top spot there. The rest of the divisions had just dribs and drabs of folks, but there are winners there, too. Carry Optics was won by Bryce Dupuy, Limited 10 by Wayne Alcock, PCC by Trey Nicholson, Production by Michael Grimes and Single Stack by Jamie Humphrey. Thanks again to everyone for coming out today, and facing uncertain weather. We’re lucky the overcast skies held on as long as they did, but it got brutally hot and humid by the time we were done.

And finally, special thanks to the Dupuy family for help during setup and to everyone for helping tear the match down. We greatly appreciate the effort. My squad did a great job today with pasting and keeping things moving, and it appears the other squads did as well since we all finished about the same time. Thank you squad-mates for being so proactive and helpful. I hope everyone enjoyed the stages today, and especially the speed of the match. Good luck to everyone shooting the Open Championship in two weeks.

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