South Mississippi Practical Shooting

Rain on Thursday didn’t dampen either the road or the spirits of the shooters as April came early for the Poplarville 3-Gun match. Since the normal first Sunday match date is Easter, we decided to hold the match a day early on Saturday to accommodate as many people as possible. It worked out, because we had 20 shooters for picture perfect weather all day. We started an hour later than normal, due to setup constraints in the morning, but things moved along pretty well and we were still done around normal time for a 3-Gun match.

The stages today featured a mix of close rifle here, and long range rifle there. Them that can shoot long range, do. Them that can’t, well, they know the costs. It was pretty heavy on the shotgun as well, at least on the three stages where it was shot. Each required at least one reload for most people, and it showed who practices loading and who doesn’t.

The winner today made a clear statement. It was something to the effect of, “I am here to win and there isn’t anything you can do about it!” OK, maybe he is too nice a guy to call everyone out like that, but he sure showed the rest of us how to do it by winning all four stages outright (if you don’t count the PCC guys, and they didn’t have to shoot the clay pigeons). A few of us were musing that there must have been some scoring mistake as he just can’t be that fast. But he is. Congratulations seems to be getting awful familiar for Kevin Leonhardt, who won the overall match by 16% over second place Bryan Tullos, who shot well, but was simply outgunned by someone who was dialed in today. John Nguyen won Open division but was third overall. PCC was taken by Charles Alexander. Heavy Metal was won by Wayne Alcock. Third through ninth were all within 7% of each other so it was competitive, for at least a select group of shooters. The 3-gun format demands consistency, and those that had just one bad stage paid heavily today.

April is membership renewal month and we had quite a few people join/rejoin the club. We greatly appreciate your support and will be making more range improvements this year with your dues. Thank you to all the shooters for helping get things picked up in a reasonable time frame.

The next match in Poplarville is USPSA pistol on April 8. Registration is open here.

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