South Mississippi Practical Shooting

The first match of the new year was a bit out of the ordinary, at least as far as match content goes. Sure, the weather was flaky (used to that) and the road dicey (used to that), but the stages were anything but “used to that.” As many of you know, we shoot 3-Gun the Sunday before Pistol and last week, we had some pretty fun stages with multiple guns, and I thought that shooting them with just a pistol would be more fun, too. So, with a few minor changes (like replacing clay pigeons with steel plates), we had some big-time field courses.

A bit of rain yesterday afternoon made the hill road a little slick this morning, but almost everybody was able to get up without help. It wasn’t a perfect day for shooting but we still had 34 hearty souls come out for what may become an annual match format. It was cool and breezy all day and it made it hard to get warm. But January often isn’t our best weather, so we’ve come to expect this. Two years ago in January, it was 22 degrees and one year ago it was 24 degrees when we arrived to set up. Today’s low 40’s seemed like a heat wave, relatively speaking. But I heard more than a few wish it was August.

Five stages certainly isn’t unusual for this match, but field courses with between 43 and 48 rounds each is. Keep in mind, these came from a 3-gun match where rifles and shotguns are the norm, along side the pistol. I warned the shooters to leave the Single Stack and Production rigs at home and some heeded the call, but others still gave it the old college try. I think all the mags were eventually found, but they were everywhere!

While the PCC shooters seemed to have an advantage with the ability to shoot entire stages without reloading, it was actually an Open shooter who took first Overall. With his first match win at Poplarville, Phillip Sexton dominated the field taking 1st in the three big field courses to garner a ton of points. Needless to say, he also won Open. The PCC title went to Aaron Fitzgerald who was just 2% behind Phillip, and actually shot slightly faster overall, but scoring minor will always be the big factor. The Limited win went to David Pape but it was pretty close there. Sal LaBruzza is really coming on strong and he shot a great match today and was second in Limited. The Carry Optics win went to Stoney Steele. The normal Production shooters listened to the warning and either changed guns or shot Limited minor because there were no shooters in that division today. There were three brave shooters in Single Stack and the title today belongs to Karen Hooper. Congratulations to all the winners and thank you to everyone for playing along with our crazy plan. If you had fun, let us know!

Next month, we’ll be back to normal, or whatever serves as normal in Poplarville.

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