Range Day After Action Review

I've been the facilitator for IDPA practices at my club for about 10 months now.  From July to December the duties were pretty light since I was the only participant.  Since January though the shooting group has grown from me to a group of about twelve.  One problem I find is that we only have the one range available and for safety's sake I'm not running multiple courses of fire on the same range.  The problem with this is that people spend a lot of time standing around.  Boredom kills so harkening back to the days I (briefly) taught Aikido I thought I'd institute some drills.  One hour of drills and two hours of shooting various course of fire.

I wasn't too sure of the reception I'd receive so I told the guys that we'd try it moving forward and anyone who didn't want to do the drills could just show up an hour late.  It seems that the drills were enthusiastically received.

Overall everyone seemed to have a great time, we practiced:

• drawing and firing
• tactical reloads
• reloads with retention
• reload from slidelock

The courses of fire were fun.  A father son team brought a small safe so we did a course of fire with the pistol unload and locked in the safe.  Quite challenging!  We also did some strong hand shooting from very short range (2-3 yards) while backpedaling.  I ran through that course a couple of times and watched the other guys doing it.  The best times all followed the same procedure:

1. Draw and fire two shot from the hip.
2. Fire two shots with the pistol elevated to the shoulder.
3. Fire the last two shots aiming.

The most interesting thing were the procedural errors.  We all made a procedural error on T3 (target #3).  We'd fire the last two shots aimed with TWO hands.  It was a very natural progression.  Next session is in two weeks and we're going to practice strong and weak hand shooting.