This morning I headed down to H2O Fowl Farms in Dunn, NC for their monthly IDPA match. This was my first time shooting at this facility, and it was also my first time shooting my new Smith & Wesson M&P 9Pro. I’m going to rave about this match, and the facility, because I think it is a fantastic place to host competition shooting matches.
My squad consisted of a couple more experienced shooters, and several new shooters. We met up before the match, and talked about safety, how the range commands work, scoring, etc. to make sure everyone was ready when the match started. The first stage was shot blind, meaning that there were large tarps strung up keeping those who had not shot the stage from seeing where the targets were before they shot. The rest of the stages involved some sort of scenario, that involved movement, use of cover, moving props, steel, and other things to make the course of fire more challenging.
This was my first match shooting the Smith & Wesson M&P 9Pro that I picked up yesterday, and I have to say, its a lot different than my Glocks. Not necessarily in a bad way, but its different. While dry-firing the pistol last night, I felt that the trigger was awful, after shooting it today, I didn’t notice it while shooting. I also generally ride the reset when shooting my Glocks, and being that the M&P has a reset that is hard to distinguish, I thought that it would also cause me some trouble, but I was incorrect again, and it shot just fine. I had a little trouble nailing my grip on the draw, and I’m not sure if it is because of the new pistol, or because my hands are pretty torn up at the moment. Either way, I need to work on my grip a little with this new pistol.
All in all, this was a great match, and I think everyone had a good time. I hope to see the new shooters out at some more matches in the future, and I’m anxiously awaiting the scores!
Ben B. grabbed some video from the match. His video below, and a quick one he put together of me shooting stage 6 below that.
Here’s a few pictures from the match, I didn’t get everyone, on every stage, but I hopefully got pictures of everyone on our squad.
