SF soldier on competition shooting

[okie john]

Match rules define how you compete against other shooters. You can't ignore them, but you can add rules and compete against yourself.

For instance, in my first IDPA match, I got mostly -0 hits but I finished in the bottom third of ~75 shooters because I didn't understand how important speed was in my score.

The winners were fast, but they were all less accurate than me and they did things I thought were tactically unsound. I decided that I would be good on my own terms: anything other than -0 would be cause for deep personal shame, I’d shoot full-power ammo, I’d wear street clothes with a realistic cover garment, and I’d shoot my EDC pistol from my EDC holster and belt plus a few mag carriers.

Within a few matches, I was finishing in the top third. Then I got some quality training and started finishing in the top 2-3 shooters while still following my own rules.

Then I started competing against the stage designers. Our club had one designer who was diabolical. He was a physician, and one day he brought a model of a baby to the match. This thing had been used for training in his hospital so it was pretty realistic: it weighed eight or nine pounds, it was the right size, had a diaper, the whole nine yards. The story was that you were babysitting and had to shoot your way out of a house full of attackers. People were taking two and three minutes to run the stage with a shitload of penalties, but I shot it clean in 26 seconds.

Afterwards, he came up to me.

"How did you shoot that stage so fast?"

"Well, it was an area ambush, so an instant counterattack is the only way to survive. A real baby would flip out when the first shot was fired so I got firm grip on him, shot Reverse Weaver on the left-hand part, and I pulled my workspace in close to keep from dropping him on the reload."

The doctor walked away shaking his head.

I won that stage technically, psychologically, and morally.


Okie John

[mmc45414]

For instance, in my first IDPA match, I got mostly -0 hits but I finished in the bottom third of ~75 shooters because I didn't understand how important speed was in my score.
The winners were fast, but they were all less accurate than me and they did things I thought were tactically unsound.

One thing that is a personal struggle is managing any acceptance of penalties. I was brought up in this as not quitting and not stopping until you have finished the task, but then I would go look at the results and see lots of people placing way ahead of me, who logged more penalties, and that bothered me. These are just local matches, and sometimes the penalties are maybe not well synchronized to the difficulty, so rather than go to war with some nasty target from some required contorted position you can improve your ranking by just taking a 5-10sec penalty rather than going to war with one target. Also sometimes spinning your wheels for too long puts you at risk of timing out and collecting penalties for Failure to Engage and Failure to Neutralize, and that really piles up the penalties.

I am kinda at peace with this, since if you have been unable to hit something in ~10sec, shooting at it more might not be the winning approach anyway...

[Super77]

Sort of a side topic, sort of not. The way most military units train, including many SOF, is not consistent with sustained skill building. It's usually some quarterly at best, shoot a bunch and get everyone over the bar type program. The reason a lot of these .mil people are humbled by a pudgy accountant in USPSA is the accountant practices a little every week and gets really good bit by bit. If some of these units treated shooting, even dry fire, the same way they do PT (a little every day) they'd do a lot better.

[High Cross]

Sort of a side topic, sort of not. The way most military units train, including many SOF, is not consistent with sustained skill building. It's usually some quarterly at best, shoot a bunch and get everyone over the bar type program. The reason a lot of these .mil people are humbled by a pudgy accountant in USPSA is the accountant practices a little every week and gets really good bit by bit. If some of these units treated shooting, even dry fire, the same way they do PT (a little every day) they'd do a lot better.

This is really good advice that can be extended to anything