Tactical Training Tuesday Report – 9/14/2010: My First Win!

This Tuesday, I attended my third  “Tactical Training Tuesday” (T3 League at Sim-Trainer in Moraine, Ohio).  Here’s some iPhone 4 video footage of the two courses of fire the league was challenged with tonight:

Course #1 – this course was pretty straight forward.  Four targets, two shots each target, each shot made from behind concealment.  Here’s my buddy John (who always looks so much better than me when he shoots) going through the 1st course:

Here’s the video on the 2nd course.  As usual, the 2nd course is considerably more challenging.  You start from a seated position, and draw from the holster and finish shooting from a kneeling position from behind a simulated wall located behind the chair you start from – with lots of moving and shooting in between.  Note the white “hostage” target positioned front and center of the course which you must not hit while shooting at the other targets:

I can’t believe it even as I type the words, but this week I got the high score for the evening – 80 out of 80 on the first course, and 155 out of 160 on the second.  Which means that out of two runs on each of the four courses,  I missed exactly one shot.  In fact, I even beat Sim-Trainer NRA Certified instructor Mark Avery by 5 points.  Here’s the score sheet – my score circled in yellow, and Mark’s shown with a red check mark:

Here’s some photos of my targets from the 2nd, harder course.  Even more than the score, I was particularly pleased at the grouping I was getting.  Here’s the furthest target, on the far right side of the course:

Three of the shots are dead center mass – that really made me happy.  Now here’s the target to the immediate left of the above target.  This is the target you had to shoot at, and NOT hit the white “hostage” target which was positioned to the front of this target – a tricky shot to make while seated:

I didn’t have as tight of a grouping here as I would like, but this was one of the targets you had to shoot at while moving, so I’m actually very pleased.  Everyone at the league was very impressed and I received many congratulations after my run – “You are NOT supposed to shoot this well in your third week – next week, we’re taking the sights off your gun!”  My buddy John Rigano also had a good week (as you can see in the videos, he’s both smooth and fast when he moves through the courses) but again struggled with not hitting the “good guy” hostage target – his third in as many weeks.  I won’t be surprised to see the white target actually tremble next week….  🙂

So how did I do it?  Well, firstly let me point out that I’m still abysmally slow relative to the rest of the league – the run times are listed on the score sheet above.  I have a LOT of work to do getting comfortable with moving and shooting.  I’m told that A)score is FAR more important than time, and B)My time will improve with….time.  I still feel a freshman at the senior prom while I’m moving out there though.  So I was moving through the course a lot slower than everyone else, so you’d expect that my shots would be more accurate.

I think what also tipped the scales in my favor this week was the lack of a moving target.  Both last week and the week prior, we had to shoot at some form of a moving target – which I didn’t do particularly well.  This week, all the targets were stationary.

The other thing which helped me going into Tuesday night’s performance was the fact that I had just done my CCW Class the weekend prior.  That made for some GREAT practice and good preparation for Tuesday.

I expect that when the league scores are posted, I’ll fall somewhere in the top 10 once the times are factored in the scores.  But I’m clearly improving every week, which is a great feeling!  Next week I hear we’re doing a low-light shooting exercise.  That should be “fun.”  I guess I’ll have to get some night sights put on my Springfield Armory XD(m) 9.