shooterDrew's progress journal

[shooterDrew]

Damn I almost forgot that I was posting into this journal. Its been a while. Looks like 18 months! Life has been good, but between lots of shooting and young kids the shooting journal hasn't really been a priority. In the last year and a half I have achieved some big goals, and set some new ones. First off I made a move out of production to hi cap divisions. One of my least favorite things about 10 round mags was I always felt like hitting reload positions and exact stage plans was more important than speed... and I just wanna go fast. Anyway, I jumped into Open division and loved it! Thanks to a local range and gun store sponsoring me I was able to save some cash and picked up an STI DVC in 9mm. I got about 5,000 rounds through it in the spring of '17 and made Master class in Open before the slide/comp cracked and the gun had to be sent back to STI. They sent me a new gun in fairly short order, but not in time for there to be a major hiccup in my major match shooting schedule. As it was I already picked up a limited gun, STI Edge, and made the move to limited in the mean time. As far as open is concerned I freaking loved it. . . all throttle! I did notice a big problem tho, at a high level the game gets so fast that if you're not spot on with your index and finding the dot you really have a hard time keeping up. Having only been shooting a dot gun for a few months I was still struggling being as quick as I needed to be, this was frustrating. Once the gun went down and I was forced to back to irons, at least for a while, I found that Limited had most of the awesome elements of open, hi cap and major scoring, but allowed me to stick with iron sights that I've always used on pistol. This division quickly became where I was most comfortable. I started shooting limited around April and by July I had racked up enough decent classifiers to bump Limited to Master and then fairly quickly I made the jump to Grand Master in my first division in August! I had shot limited for several major matches over the season up to this point and was doing better. An 87% finish at 14th place at Area 6 earlier in the year gave me some confidence and although I tried to go back to open a few times once the gun came back, I never felt as comfortable there and ultimately decided I'd make Limited my primary division. In Limited I was able to rack up a 2nd place overall Limited finishes at the Michigan Section, Kentucky Section, and Monster Match down in Florida, and I was able to get my first overall division win at the Illinois Section Championship! I then made the trip out to Utah for the Iron Sight Nationals. What a great trip!  Utah was awesome for shooting, I hope I can go back. As far as the match was concerned it was a blast. I had a few disaster stages that crapped on my overall, but the rest of the match was solid. I ended up around 38th about mid pack for GMs in the match. Since then the weather has turned in Indiana and match shooting is a no go. I was able to make Grand Master in a second division - Limited 10 - at our last local.. which is cool. However, since the divisions are pretty much the exact same thing I wont say its nearly as much of an accomplishment as it would be in another division with a different gun. I intend on pursuing GM in other divisions, but will be primarily shooting limited for now. Not sure how much I'll get back to the shooting journal, hopefully more than I have, because I think its a good thing to unpack some of the mental process throughout this adventure. Now if I can just find the motivation to get down in my freezing cold basement and keep up with the dryfire!