Trying to get organized with practice

My ammo budget is rather limited these days. What am I saying...it's always been limited. I love what I do, but I'm not getting rich doing it. I'll take donations, in case either of my readers were wondering.

Once again, I digress! The point is that with a limited budget, maximizing the value of each round becomes critical to being able to improve. To that end, I've attempted to get more organized with what I'm practicing. This came about because there will hopefully be a Classifier shot at our club again soon, so a couple weeks ago I decided to bring the Classifier COF out to the range to reference and to work on what I didn't do very well on. There are parts of that test that I don't work on much, such as one handed and weak hand shooting. Other parts, like shooting and moving, come easy to me, thanks to about ten years in marching bands. Having that course of fire to base practice on was very useful. The actual Classifier is a 90 round exercise, so it works pretty good as a practice test.

If you've been reading here for a while, you may have noticed that I really like shooting with Matt E. It used to be Matt and Paul J, but Paul punked out and decided to move home, get married to a wonderful lady and go to college instead of staying here and shooting with me and Matt. He may have made the right choice, but the jury is deliberating. ;)

Anyway, Matt and I have, in the recent past, shot some interesting Standards, including the 10-8, Hackathorn, and the Operator Standards. There are others, including Kyle Defoor's, the FBI's, and more. The nice thing about these is that they're not incredible wazoo difficult tests, but in the aggregate, your score will suffer if you have a weakness in any of the tested areas.

Now, hopefully in the near future Chris W and Bo R. will be added to the clan, once they get memberships to the range. Both of these dudes are excellent shooters, and good guys to train with. Along with Casey B, that'll make five of us that shoot together, and points out the need to get organized. What I hope to do at some point is to put together a calendar and have everybody have a particular day to bring whatever COF they want to use, whether it's downloaded from somewhere or made up before hand. So, I've begun the collecting of COF's and compiling them in a binder and separating them by type of firearm (handgun, carbine, or both). I'm hoping this will be an easy resource to maximize limited ammunition.

I'm also pondering getting shirts made and having an informal "team" for the monthly matches. The name's picked out, but I have to check with a buddy of mine that does small run custom printed t-shirts. That part could be fun, and has the potential to get big. Have to see where that goes somewhere down the line.