On October 10/11, 2015, I hosted Tom Givens for his Combative Pistol 1 course in Peoria, AZ at the Cowtown shooting range.
I have known of Tom for a good amount of time, and I have known him personally since meeting when we were both instructors at the Mid-Atlantic Training Conference in 2010. And for the past few years I have been privileged to be a presenter at his own Rangemaster Conference. But even after all that, I had not had the chance to actually get on the range and be taught by him. Which has been a burning need for some time, ever since Craig Douglas said to me that if he could only send a person to one pistol class, it would be Combative Pistol 1. That kind of thing makes me sit up and pay attention. So, since I had not been able to work out my schedule to go to him, I decided to bring him to me.
We were blessed with pretty good weather. A bit of rain, but mostly cloud cover that kept the temperature at a nice point, and kept the sun form beating us down. However, since we did not have a real classroom, the makeshift range facilities did not work out well. Normally, Tom starts with some video presentations and classroom work, but we had to modify this and went straight to the shooting part.
What followed was much of the standard type of instruction that you get in these classes, however the presentation and teaching of those things were at a substantially higher level than I have seen. Tom’s ability to get across important details is unmatched. The course for me was worth just the part of understanding things like timing in shooting and timing in trigger work. I made an enormous leap in performance just from those things. And it showed in the shooting performance.
The first day was focused (as it should be) on the foundations. After diagnostic drills to let Tom know where we were, we got to the meat of the course. A lot of shooting, but there was never a moment where I felt like a round was wasted. Every round fired downrange meant something.
For the second day, we started in a place where we could actually see Tom’s videos and Power Point presentations. While normally this is interspersed throughout the course, we had to eat in a one sitting. This was daunting, because so much of what Tom is focused on is instilling the need for a fighting mindset. It is hard to see and talk about good people getting killed and severely injured for an entire morning. But it is needed. The feedback from everyone in the class across the board was how much it impacted them the right way.
We took a short lunch break and got back to shooting. Here Tom upped the ante, ratcheting up the pressure and making the shooting challenges harder, including the horrid “Casino Drill” which is about as challenging a test as I have ever seen. The most interesting thing to me as an instructor was watching how Tom slowly raised the heat to where we all were forced to dig deep, but he never went too fast or so hard where a student would fall apart. Here also is where Tom’s sense of humor helped to keep things light enough at appropriate spots but never distracted from the seriousness of what we were doing.
I also appreciated that with everything Tom taught; there was the “why”. You could disagree with it, but you always understood the reasoning. There was never a single moment where Tom pulled the authority card and said “do it this way because I said so”. We were all treated as thinking adults. A very empowering approach for sure.
To sum up, this was one of the best self-defense oriented courses I have ever taken. My performance was significantly better by the end of the weekend, my mindset was in an even better and more focused place, and I had a boatload of fun! What more could you ask for?
I had enough of a good time to go through the hassle of hosting again next year where I will bring Tom out for his Instructor Development course. I can’t wait!
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