AAR: Sentinel Concepts RDS Handgun, August 28, 2020

Sentinel Concepts
RDS Handgun
Instructor:

Steve Fisher
Date:
August 28, 2020
Location:
Mead Hall Range, McCloud, OK
Weather:
Sunny, moderate breeze, high of 101°F
Equipment:
CZ P-07 w/ Trijicon RM09, Federal American Eagle 124gr 9mm, AIWB holster

Student Background:

Average enthusiast background. Learned to shoot as a kid. Never did anything serious until I shot a run and gun in 2016, picked up USPSA with a club in college. Shot a handful of matches every year only getting marginally better each time. No formal instruction prior to this class, maybe a half day of one on one coaching from a USPSA M-class friend.

Preparation:

Minimal/not enough. Have barely shot at all this year. Zeroed my dot at 25 yards a month before the class. Shot a hundred or so rounds to shake off cobwebs. Dry fired daily mostly focusing on my trigger press. A week before the class I swapped batteries in my RMR and shot 50 rounds to confirm my zero.

Demographics:

There were 15 students in class and it was about 2:1 LEO:civilian if I caught everybody’s intro correctly.

Instruction:

Class began in the classroom. Everybody introduced themselves, and Steve gave the safety briefing and began to lecture. As it is an RDS focused class, there was an immediate focus on the hardware. What dots are good, what dots are bad, what support equipment and tools do you use with the dots? A bit of lecture with diagrams of dot placement in windows, back up iron sights, and shooting with a dead dot. Heavy, repeated, emphasis of “it’s not complicated, it’s just shooting, the sight is just different”. Steve is a fervent advocate for 25 yard zeroes on handgun optics.

For shooting Steve broke us into two relays, but for most of the exercises we all shot at once since there was enough space and Steve's targets all have multiples of each target on them. Two B8s, four "dot torture" dots, two USPSA A-Zones. We started with checking our zeros at 10 yards in the dots, and Steve would make corrections for people that needed to adjust their optics.

Now I wish I had made some notes of all the different drills we did throughout the day, but for the most part we shot a lot of B8s at 10, 15, and 25 yards with varying par-times. Several exercises involved reholstering and drawing for every shot, or pairs of shots.
Specific exercises I remember:
At one point when the whole group seemed to be losing focus he had us go up to the 5 yard line and do ten rounds into the A zone as fast as we could, followed by pointing out how much larger these groups are than the black of a B8. Everybody seemed to settle in a bit after that and start using more of the par time instead of rushing through a course of fire.
Another A-Zone exercise was done without using our dot or any iron sights students may or may not have had. We were to aim using only the housing of the dot. I think this was at 5 yards, but it may have been 7. It was interesting how much worse my group wasn't compared to using the dot.
One exercise was to load our guns, then drop the magazine, and fire one shot followed by a dry trigger pull so we could observe our sight picture through a theoretically non-dry trigger pull.
Another exercise involved ten rounds without using any fingers to grip the gun. Only holding the pistol with the web of your strong hand and your trigger finger as you fired. While awkward, this highlighted deficiencies in trigger pulls without the interference of the rest of a firing grip.

Final test was 10 rounds in 10 seconds at 10 yards, 10 rounds in 15 seconds (I think) at 15 yards, and 10 rounds in 1 minute at 25 yards to a B8.

Main Takeaways:
Steve made corrections to my grip (mostly thumb placement on both hands) and my stance (brought the gun in a little, bent the elbows a little, relaxed the shoulders down some) that did not yield instant improvement on target, but they felt more repeatable to maintain shot-to-shot than I was before. My trigger pull sucks. Even in single action I still stage the trigger unless I'm in full Ricky bobby mode. I stage it right at the last possible instant and hold for the "perfect" sight picture and then jerk it through. I need to work on a smooth, constant speed trigger press. I really liked shooting B8s. They are simple yet challenging and very versatile. I plan on using them a lot in my practice going forward, and I need to pick one or two exercises or drills to use as metrics for my improvement. ProGrip is actually a lifesaver on hot humid days. Don't tuck in stretchy athletic shirts behind an AIWB holster. You will catch the shirt in your draw stroke, and it's way worse than just sucking it up and drawing from concealment.

I've had this AAR half written as a draft since the week of this course. It would be a bit more detailed if I had completed it sooner, but not drastically. The heat and my own focus on my own shooting during the course kind of wiped out a lot of the details of the shooting portion. Everything notable I remember about shooting, I wrote about, everything else boiled down to different ways and difficulties of maintaining control of the gun, managing the sight picture, and smooth trigger presses.
 
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