South Mississippi Practical Shooting

We are extremely pleased to announce the return of the Hattiesburg USPSA pistol match! Our next match will be SUNDAY, November 17, 2019. Yes, that’s Sunday and not Saturday. Registration on Practiscore will open at 5 PM, today, October 11, 2019 at 5 PM. Here is your link to register.

While the range will remain the same, there will be a new staff in charge of the match. Nick Brandt has volunteered to take over the Match Director role. Many of you know Nick from the Steel Challenge world, but may not know he actually got his start in competitive shooting in USPSA. Another big change to the match staff will come from other familiar faces. Bryce and Blayne Dupuy will be responsible for designing and setting up the stages for each match. If you have shot USPSA pistol anywhere in South Mississippi in the past couple of years, you have seen these two young men rising though the ranks to become some of the best local talent we have. What you may not have known is Bryce has been designing stages for several of the state section matches for a while. He provided several designs for this year’s Mississippi Classic and was asked to submit designs for the 2019 Louisiana Gator, as well. I have personally seen many of his designs, and can assure you they are top notch.

Plans are to have 5 stages plus a classifier at the next match. We plan to have 5 stops for 5 squads, at least for the first few matches. One of the bays will contain 2 smaller stages than can be shot back to back by one shooter (as two separately timed and scored stages) without unloading in between stages. This is something we almost always see at Level 2 and up matches, and it gets more variety involved without slowing things down. We’ll see how it goes and if things come back to the “good old days” at Hattiesburg, we may even add a stage or two the local match in the future.

I would be remiss if I did not thank the original team who got this match launched just three short years ago. Cliff Gaddis will remain as club president, but will be taking a more scaled back role at the match, possibly as just a shooter. It was Cliff’s efforts that led to the birth of this club and match. Paul Harris was the man behind the computer (and way more) pretty much from the beginning. As you may have read in July (https://smsps.com/2019/07/02/brothers-n-arms-uspsa-pistol-match-update/), Paul had to step down as Match Director due to non-shooting related issues. Sometimes, life gets in the way of our hobby and you need to take care of things. I have spoken with Paul and worked with him to find a way to keep this match going. He assures me he will be back shooting when he gets his proverbial ducks in a row. When you see Paul, please thank him for his tireless work in making this match what it was, and will be once again. Special thanks also goes to Jamie Humphrey and Greg Hammer, who were part of the original team that got this thing off the ground.

A final note about the change of the day of the week is appropriate. From the beginning, this match was shot on a Saturday, but it was the 4th Saturday. This put the Hattiesburg and Biloxi matches on the same weekend (usually), and it was certainly workable, but maybe not ideal. Along the way, a decision was made to move to the 3rd Saturday to get on a weekend without another USPSA match in the South Mississippi area. While I don’t know the details of why Saturday was chosen over Sunday, it always seemed to work out, at least until it was moved to the 3rd weekend. This conflicted with one of the Mobile pistol matches that were already on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of the month. The change was not designed to take shooters from Mobile but instead, to provide another option for a match on a different weekend in our area. With the new plan to move the match to Sunday, we will almost certainly lose those shooters who cannot attend Sunday morning matches anywhere, and we regret inconveniencing anyone. However, the match staff has chosen Sunday for the convenience and potential of getting setup help from locals on Saturday, when necessary. With a Saturday match day, it was darn near impossible to get folks who work to come out during the week to help. We’ll see how this goes and if the situation presents itself, we may (down the road, in the future, but not right now) try alternating a Saturday and a Sunday match day from month to month. So, for now, we will shoot the 3rd Sunday of the month, starting in November.

Registration will be open for over a month for this match, so we have time to get the word out. Normally, it will open a couple of weeks before the match. If you know fellow shooters who enjoyed the Hattiesburg match before the break, let them know we are back. All comments are welcome, both good and bad.