South Mississippi Practical Shooting

We finally managed to get the July match in, but it took three tries over 5 weeks. The regularly scheduled July match was rained out the afternoon before with a monsoon. We rescheduled the match for the 5th Sunday and the same thing happened, with a frog strangler the afternoon before the match. The range might have been OK, but the road in was out of commission. Today, the rain gods stayed somewhere else and we got to shoot 6 tough stages that were just waiting for us all this time.

The turnout was a bit light due to some late cancellations and a big handful of no-shows this morning, but that just meant the 25 folks that did make it out were able to breeze through the match and be done well before Noon. It was hot at times, but we had a nice breeze most of the morning and when you were under one of the pop-ups, it was almost pleasant.

I was pleased with how the stages turned out today. They proved to be as challenging as I had hoped. Only one shooter shot a clean match today. Way to go, Don Albares! To the rest of you, thanks for playing. Quite a few of us will be representing South Mississippi and Louisiana in the upcoming Nationals, and our local clubs are making a concerted effort to toughen up the local matches in preparation for what we know will be hard stages at the national level. Today’s mix was fair, offered numerous options on most cases, and rewarded those who had a good plan and executed it with the fewest penalties.

Since everyone except one shooter had at least one penalty (Mike, No-Shoot or Procedure), the match came down to consistency. Our match winner today was John Nguyen by a comfortable 11.6%. John was also first in Open. David Pape was a strong 3rd overall and 1st in Limited. Blayne Dupuy, fresh off a 4th place finish in the Area 5 match a week ago, took 1st in Carry Optics. His brother Bryce took the Production win while Scott Jacob won PCC using an interesting carbine with a 5.5″ barrel coupled with an 11″ shroud to make a super-light, non-NFA rifle. The highly touted Single Stack battle went to Gerwin Henn.

As always, this match works because of the support of the shooters. Once again, we had great help in getting stuff taken down, and several individuals stood out. I hesitate to mention names because I just can’t notice everyone, but I saw Scott Jacob and Greg Hammer going above and beyond the expected. Thanks, guys! I really appreciate your help. And to those of you who also busted butt but went unnoticed by me, thank you, too.

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