South Mississippi Practical Shooting

For the last match of the year and just two days before Christmas, we had a great turnout. A total of 46 shooters closed out the first full year for the Deep South Shooters Association with a bang, both figuratively and literally. The five stages pushed everyone to and sometimes beyond their capabilities. A couple of regulars stepped out of their comfort zone and strapped on a different division, just for a change. And we found out that it doesn’t matter a whole lot which gun you shoot for the good ones. The weather was also just about perfect with mostly overcast skies, and very mild temperatures the entire morning.

The top spot on the podium wasn’t much in doubt throughout the day, so it comes with little surprise that John Nguyen was up there once again with the Open and Overall titles. His 5% win over 2nd place Kevin Leonhardt, who won PCC, was pretty impressive. Moving on to Limited is where is gets a little weird. While Limited is usually dominated by a Henn or Tannetta or Pape named shooter, it was a Henn for the win, but not the expected Henn. It was the normally Open shooting ROGER Henn winning Limited today, possibly at the expense of Steve Tannetta who had a very uncharacteristic DQ on his last stage of the day. The usual top Limited GM GERWIN Henn shot Production today (why?) and of course, he won that division. In Carry Optics, Ball Mahley shot accurately and quickly to take the top spot there. And last but not least, Rob Campbell took the Single Stack crown.

The stages were both challenging (lots of Mikes and No-Shoots for many) and yet, fun. They were hard but a fair test of your skills. The design team received quite a few positive compliments for today’s work. Your humble author would like to thank Frank Ryder for being the only shooter who had more No-shoots than me today. I had 5, which was probably a record for a local match and it only took 2 stages to collect them all! Ughhhh!

Thanks to everyone who came out today and to the folks who were able to stick around and get everything put up. A huge thanks also goes out to all our shooters for a very successful first full year for the DSSA club, too. We hope you are enjoying some of the most challenging stages you’ll see in the region. We do that so we all will get better. It may take a while for some, but you will improve when you shoot more difficult stages. Please feel free to thank your fearless leader, Gerwin Henn, if you are enjoying the challenge.

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