{"id":13359,"date":"2012-02-17T10:30:04","date_gmt":"2012-02-17T16:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/blog\/?p=13359"},"modified":"2012-02-16T18:59:07","modified_gmt":"2012-02-17T00:59:07","slug":"knocking-the-rust-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/blog\/knocking-the-rust-off\/13359\/","title":{"rendered":"Knocking The Rust Off"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>OK. It\u2019s not like I\u2019ve had hours and hours to practice, but in celebration of the 15th anniversary of the Smith & Wesson IDPA Indoor Championships, and considering I’m the executive director of IDPA<\/a>, I felt it appropriate to come \u2018out of retirement\u2019 to shoot what has come to be the season opener for IDPA.<\/p>\n

My return to competition was something I was more or less goaded into while visiting Frank Glover\u2019s Range in Oxford, N.C. Frank was hosting his infamous Day-Night-Day match and I was there scouting the facility for the 2012 IDPA National Championship.<\/p>\n

Well, before I knew it, I had a gun, holster and ammo and was back in the swing of it \u2013 albeit, fairly rusty, but nevertheless shooting the match.<\/p>\n

And no sooner had Smith & Wesson’s Tom Yost seen me shooting than he offered me an M&P Pro<\/a> to shoot in the Stock Service Division…at one of our largest championship matches. Before I could diplomatically back out Gordon Carrell of Comp-Tac Victory Gear<\/a> made sure I had a holster, mag pouches and a flashlight pouch.<\/p>\n

At this point I had to face the reality that I was going to be shooting the Smith & Wesson IDPA Indoor Championships. Lucky for me I have a good contact over at Wilson Combat<\/a> and getting plenty of ammo wasn’t a problem at all.<\/p>\n

Just about a month ago I put some of that ammo to good use as Gordon Carrell came up to the ranch for a ‘tune-up’. I’m not really sure it helped much, but then I haven’t had a whole lot of time to practice. His training<\/a> is really good, my application of it, well….<\/p>\n

If you are unfamiliar with it, the Smith & Wesson match is one of the finest in the country and on Saturday, the final day of the event, a veritable who’s who of IDPA’s top guns will be shooting it out in a desperate battle for the highly coveted division titles.<\/p>\n

I on the other hand will be shooting on Wednesday, with the Safety Officers and far away from the prying, and perhaps critical eyes of the 300+ IDPA members who might want to see how their executive director handles herself in competition.<\/p>\n

I have a message for those interested in how I shoot…move along, nothing to see here.<\/p>\n

This year’s match director is Frank Glover, one of our sport’s most respected stage designers who is well known for testing both a shooter’s skill and wits.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, whatever match embarrassment I might experience will be shared with the other members of the IDPA headquarters staff \u2013 you can call us Team IDPA.<\/p>\n

Like me they’ll all be shooting Smith & Wesson pistols. Considering IDPA’s long relationship with Smith & Wesson, and their unwavering and incredibly generous support for many of our matches, we thought it only fitting to shoot their guns in their house.<\/p>\n

None of us are under any delusions that we’ll be recruited to become permanent members of Team S&W, but one can dream. I know that we will all have a wonderful experience and hopefully be able to spotlight one of the finest matches in the country.<\/p>\n

On behalf of IDPA and our more than 19,000 members, I invite you to find a local club<\/a> near you and join us out on the range. Trust me when I tell you that competing in IDPA matches can be some of the best shooting you experience…even if you have to knock a little of the rust off.<\/p>\n

– Joyce Wilson, Executive Director of IDPA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK. It\u2019s not like I\u2019ve had hours and hours to practice, but in celebration of the 15th anniversary of the Smith & Wesson IDPA Indoor Championships, and considering I’m the executive director of IDPA, I felt it appropriate to come \u2018out of retirement\u2019 to shoot what has come to be the season opener for IDPA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":13366,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[116,164],"tags":[2338,521,3607,2337,59,989],"class_list":["post-13359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bloggers","category-idpa","tag-frank-glover","tag-gordon-carrell","tag-idpa","tag-joyce-wilson","tag-smith-wesson","tag-tom-yost"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13359"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13359\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.downrange.tv\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}