South Mississippi Practical Shooting

Once again, a strange thing happened this week. A match just popped up out of nowhere and was a hit. With our second straight rain-out on the regular match day, we found there is a willing and able audience for a weekday afternoon make-up match format. Last month, we had 33 guns shoot for the same type of event, and today, there were 39. In fact, the turnout was a bit of a mixed blessing. The support is hugely appreciated but it caused some backups today that I didn’t anticipate.

The good news is with the increased support, we will be able to begin the range upgrade plan that will create more defined bays with real berms. This should allow us to shoot at least 5 stages at the same time, which eludes us now. This also will include a more permanent fix for the road into the range, so we should be able to avoid at least some of the rain-outs that have plagued us recently, where the range is fine, but the road is impassible.

With 5 challenging stages, lots of shooters found ways to receive a visit from their unwanted Uncle Mike today. There were also some really great performances. But there is always one man (or woman) left standing when the score-dust settles. Today, that dusty person was John Nguyen, who won the Overall match and Open division. One of our freshly minted M class Limited shooters, Steve Tannetta, turned in another great performance and took second Overall and first in Limited. Blayne Dupuy shot well enough to win Carry Optics (he’s definitely going to be a force to be reckoned with  in the near future), and his brother Bryce took Production. Karen Hooper rounded out the winner’s circle with a first in Single Stack division. Congratulations to all the winners in today’s match.

April is our membership renewal month and even though our regular match was rained out, we still had a significant number of shooters renew their membership or join the club for the first time at the make-up match. Your support helps us keep going and we are looking forward to significant improvements to the range this year, thanks to your support.

While the past two weekday afternoon matches have been unexpected successes, we will still keep the regular second Sunday date for the future matches. We may consider a weekday match as a new addition, but with a slightly modified format going forward. It’s clear if you set it up, they will come. However, it’s also 10:21 PM and I haven’t even unloaded the truck yet. It was great but it makes for a very long day. Thank you to the last ones out the gate today for helping get everything torn down and packed up. If you hadn’t been willing to stay, I might still be at the range…

Let’s hope we get back to normal next month!

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