South Mississippi Practical Shooting

After a miserable month for shooting in South Mississippi, where rain cancelled most of the matches, we finally caught a break and had great weather for the March edition of 3-Gun. Today’s match also feature some deceptively hard stages. Each stage feature either a bunch of close-range rifle shots or a few long to really long-range rifle shots, where the latter tormented many of the shooters. There was also heavy shotgun on two stages, with quite a bit of reloading. And, not to be ignored, was the pistol which wasn’t really stressed unless you couldn’t hit the target.

With 17 shooters competing today, you would have thought at least one shooter could have shot the match clean, but you’d also be wrong. It really came down to who messed up the least. Most every shooter was heard to mumble something about how tough these stages really were. And they were. The winner’s total time, with penalties was over 249 seconds. And, shooters in second through fifth were all within 3.5% of the winner, which says it was close all the way to the end. One more penalty here or one less there could have changed the entire top 5 spots.

But someone always has to win, and the top shooter today was no stranger to the podium. With only one stage win but consistency everywhere else Kevin Leonhardt was your winner today. Hank Coates took second, but was less than 1.5% behind. David Martian rounded out the top three and was less than 0.1% behind Hank. The match seemed to be overall closer than any in recent memory, maybe because the stages were just tougher than normal. But tough doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun. There were plenty of positive compliments about the stages and the challenges presented, and the need for more practice from a couple of shooters (practice, I thought this was practice?).

We also had some great help getting things picked up, which is always appreciated and it made the day go smoothly. Now, if the weather could just be like this every match…

Normally, the Sunday following the 3-Gun match is USPSA pistol, but for March, that pistol match will be delayed until the third Sunday. The match date for USPSA pistol is March 18th. Registration is open here.

The match scores from today can be accessed by clicking the score computer to the right.