Colorado State IDPA Championships

It was a bit of a hike to drive from Denver out to Montrose for the 2013 Championships, but when you are as addicted to the shooting sports as I am, you simply hop in the car and go for it (We are heading to Utah at the end of September and New Mexico at the end of October). It was a pleasant drive, and Montrose is a pretty cool town even though they roll the sidewalks up at 9pm!

My goal going in to the match was to win my class which is Enhanced Service Pistol, Sharpshooter, otherwise known as ESP SS. This was my 1st major IDPA match and I had high expectations. I had practiced dry fire and live shooting, and felt pretty good going in to the match. The only thing that could go wrong was mental mistakes.

BluCore Shooting Team in Montrose CO

The good and the bad was I was not squadded with anyone else from my class at the match, so it was a mystery how everyone else was doing, and how I was doing in comparison. We would have to shoot 12 stages and wait for the final numbers to be calculated before anyone would find out how they did.

One particular stage had a sort of blind "bad" guy target right next to a "no shoot" target, they were so close to a barrier, from your shooting position you couldn't see which was the bad guy or good guy, and you had to shoot off memory. I ran the stage in a decent time, and felt like I had all good hits....walking around with the scoring crew I was very happy with what i was hearing....1 down through the whole stage, and then all of the sudden 10 down, failure to neutralize, and a hit on a non threat.....I was surprised, and ran over to see and there she was...the hidden non shoot, with 2 perfect headshots. For those of you that don't know, shooting the non threat or no shoot target is bad. In fact this particular "bad" cost me 15 seconds overall in penalties. I had shot the good guy, missed the bad guy and went on with my day. What it boiled down to was under the stress of the buzzer I had forgotten which target was which, and shot the wrong one. DAMN DAMN DAMN.

I walked over to the seating area and told a few people, if I lose this match, it is because of what I just did. Words that would ring so true 5 hours later....

Final scores finally calculated I walked up, and took a look:

	Rozalewycz, Jim	A41535	ESP	SS	278.01			2		152	86.00	364.01
	VanWagner, Kris	A48155	ESP	SS	295.50		3	2		108	79.00	374.50

Yep I had lost by 10.49 seconds. Without that 1 target array I would have won my 1st ever State IDPA Championship.

All of that aside, this match was a great challenge and a lot of fun. I'll proudly take my 2nd place, and make sure that I improve on that next time! I've got 30 days until the Utah State Championship, and I am once again setting my eyes on a win. This time I will just make sure I remember which one of the targets is the bad guy............