Location: Racine County Line Rifle Club, Racine, WI
Date: 8/6/22
Cost: $175
Rounds expended: 250-300
Prerequisite: must have taken an intermediate firearms course or possess equivalent skills
Weather: hot and sunny

Executive summary: a good example of solid local training

Rapid Defense is a newer company in southeast Wisconsin, having only started up about two years ago. They offer training in a variety of firearms-related areas, as well as acting as an FFL for transfers. The past weekend, I took their "Advanced Defensive Handgun" one-day class. I had wanted to get in the intermediate class, but couldn't make the date, so I hoped that I had enough skill to cover the prerequisite(s) for the advanced class. Turns out ECQC and John Murphy's Concealed Carry Advanced Skills and Tactics prepared me just fine.

The single-day format of the class was a little different from the weekend-long classes I was used to. Speaking with the owners of Rapid Defense, I found out that their business model is to try to accommodate people who can't make the cost or time commitments for an weekend-long class by providing single-day "buffet" style classes, where the object isn't to go too in-depth in any one area, but to provide a variety of topics at a certain skill level. As such, they have a "performance based" style, rather than a "standards based" style; where, rather than trying to reach a specific standard, their goal is to have each participant improve their skills by the end of the day. In addition, since they have less overhead than a national travelling trainer, they can keep the cost and the class sizes smaller.

Our instructor was John Czerwinski, a recently retired 27 year law enforcement officer, who served in the army before being a Milwaukee Police Department officer and a local sheriff's deputy. Czerwinski additionally served on and led his unit's SWAT team, was a FTO, and taught at the police academy. As an added bonus, he was mentored by Paul Howe(!).

As mentioned, our class was small; only seven including me. There were no active-duty LE or military personnel, although a few had prior military experience, but we all seemed like just "normal dudes." I felt a bit derpy that, other than one other guy and me, everyone showed up in full battle belts/competition rigs; I ran everything from my AIWB holster (despite the derpy feeling, I don't think it held me back at all; "train how you fight" amiright?). The guns I saw were an interesting mix: a couple 320's with red-dots, a G19 with a red dot (I think), a CZ Shadow(!) with a red dot, a CZ 75 compact(!), an XDS 45(again, !), and me with my PX4CC. Our instructor had a G19 with a red dot, and he was all about the dot.

The day started with a safety brief, which was in my mind just a little too brief. Having been through Craig Douglas's and John Murphy's safety briefs, I would have liked that level of preparedness, but I think the safety brief was adequate. Czerwinski then went on to explain about the "performance based vs. objective based" idea, which he adopted from Pat Mac; "can tomorrow's guy kick yesterday's guy's ass." Again, for a one-day class, this seemed like a good approach.

We then went into a review of grip, sights, and trigger manipulation. Again, we didn't dive too deeply in to any of those areas, but I will say that I have a couple starred notes in my notebook for each of those things that I will definitely concentrate on in the future, so valuable stuff right off the bat. We went on to talk about Czerwinski's take on the firing sequence, (re-)loading sequence, and malfunction action. Individually, none of the information was particularly new to me, but presented as a whole, it had a nice, logical flow to it that incorporated quite a few best practices.

The class then started on our first drill, a couple iterations of the "ball and dummy" drill to help us start thinking more about what we discussed with grip, sights, and trigger, to work in single shots. We then progressed to multi-shot drills using and increasing cadence, using increasingly rougher sight pictures to learn to balance speed vs. accuracy vs. distance in delivering "combat effective hits."

Next up was working the standard four-count draw. Nothing really new to me here (and probably not to anyone in the class), but, again, I have some starred notes on things that I had seen before that were presented in a way that "clicked" for me, like not "punching out" the gun so fast between counts three and four in order to settle the sights on the target faster. We also discussed the follow through, i.e. always having one more sight picture than shots fired.

The rest of the day was more "active" shooting. We worked firing from around cover from the kneeling, prone, and "urban prone" positions. We worked multiple targets. We worked shooting while moving forward, backward, and laterally, both left and right. We learned techniques for turning/pivoting. We did some work with "falling man" type target setup to simulate a moving target.

My notes sort of break down at this point, as we were doing more active shooting, and I'm sure I'm missing some things, but I feel that that class was well worth my time, and if you need to know my overall opinion, I can tell you that I've already signed up for another class with them.

I am in no way affiliated with them; if you are located in southeast Wisconsin, and possibly northeast Illinois, I would recommend giving them a try.
https://www.rapiddefensewi.com/