Ronin Colman 1988 class video

When I first got started in USPSA competition, one of the local club members let me copy a bad quality copy of a video he had of PACT timer inventor and firearms trainer Ronin Colman teaching in 1988. Ronin had been an IPSC shooter since the early days, had attended some of the earliest classes at Gunsite and shot major matches in the late 70’s and early 80’s. He started teaching defensive handgun classes in Texas, mostly in the Dallas and Austin area, living with Chip McCormick for awhile in Austin.

He and Chip developed a standards course of fire to use in their own training that they called the “Texas Standards”. It was passed from them to professional shooter Jim Griggs, who shared it with me in the early 1990’s. That course of fire is available here on the KR Training site.

https://www.krtraining.com/IPSC/Information/Central_Texas_Standards.html

It’s a very demanding 125 round par time, multi string test that incorporates every skill in common use in IPSC matches of the early days: from 7 yard speed shooting to 50 yard prone shooting, turning draws, 1 handed shooting, reloads, target transitions and much more. When they developed the course of fire, there were no shooting timers the way we know them now, just a par time box that used thumbwheels to set fixed par time. I’ll set up and shoot the test for a future blog post.

Using video and audio AI tools I was able to restore the video and audio from the VHS tape good enough to share with others. It’s a great snapshot of what was commonly taught in the mid to late 1980’s, heavily influenced by Jeff Cooper & the Gunsite material of that era. I’ve broken the video up into 8 segments based on the topics being covered, and trimmed out all the video of students shooting the drills.