TacCon21 (part 1)

The KR Training team taught, competed and attended sessions at the 2021 Rangemaster Tactical Conference, held in Dallas at the Dallas Pistol Club (DPC) facility. This was the 24th TacCon. I’ve attended 22 of them and been a presenter at at least 20 of them. For many of us, the event is a family reunion, getting to visit and train together. The event has moved around over its history: from many years at the “mother ship” (the original Rangemaster range in Memphis, to the US Shooting Academy in Tulsa, DARC in Arkansas, a combination shooting range/racetrack in New Orleans, and now Dallas.

DPC has been confirmed as the location for the 2022 TacCon, and registration will open in May 2021. The event always sells out many months in advance. I will share the registration link in our monthly KR Training e-newsletter posted to this blog when it becomes available.

Claude Werner has some history about the Tactical Conference here, and I posted some videos from a 2005 Shooting Gallery episode about that year’s conference here. Michael Bane was at the 2021 TacCon filming for his new “Triggered” online series.

Karl’s Sessions

I presented two sessions of my 4-hour Correcting Common Shooting Errors course, which was useful for instructors and shooters. It’s a class that I teach several times a year at our home facility, and have taught on the road.

Explaining acceptable sight picture (and aiming point) for close range defensive shooting
Demonstrating with the SIRT pistol
Another demo

John’s Sessions

John Daub was asked to fill in for Spencer Keepers, (who had to cancel due to a medical issue) teaching three 2-hour blocks of appendix carry skills. This was John’s first time to be a lead instructor at a Tactical Conference, and he received many compliments, in person and online, from students in those sessions.

Clearing the cover garment
Re holstering
“Hi, Mom!”

John is going to expand his appendix carry skills course into a 4 hour class we will offer this summer at the A-Zone.

Match Staff & Attendees

In addition to Karl and John teaching, KR Training instructors Tracy Thronburg, Dave Reichek, and Ed Vinyard all worked as range officers for our sessions and sessions run by other trainers. KR Training instructors Becky Dolgener and David Tschirhart also attended TacCon. Several KR Training challenge coin holders and many other alumni were there too, taking advantage of the opportunity to train with a wide variety of national trainers.

The Match

Part of the event is a live fire match that now includes an initial qualification stage, a tiebreaker stage, and a head-to-head shootoff on the final day. The KR Training team made a respectable showing, with Dave Reichek (7th overall) and making the top 16 for the men’s shootoff, and Tracy Thronburg (2nd womens) and top women’s shootoff. John Daub was 20th and Karl was 25th.

The qualification stage was a fixed time, 40 round course shot on a Rangemaster RM-Q target with 200 points possible. Anyone scoring over 190 shot the tiebreaker stage, which was 5 shots from 5 yards on a B-8 target, with individual times recorded. Total score for the main match was raw points from the qual stage PLUS the hit factor (points/time) from the tiebreaker. John will be including the match course of fire along with other drills from TacCon in an upcoming revision to his “Drills, Qualifications, Standards, & Tests” eBook (free download).

K Clark’s winning target (below) shows a 200 point main score with a B-8 with 50 points in 2.83 seconds. Had they counted X’s, he would also have had 5X — a truly impressive performance. That gave him a main match score of 217.61.

Perfection

There were a lot of shooters in the top 30 that shot hit factors in the 11-13 range (compared to K’s 17.6 factor). John shot a fast 43 points to get a hit factor of 12.25, my slightly slower 50 points was a hit factor of 12.59. I shot the tiebreaker right after dropping one point on the last string of the main match, which caused me to be more conservative than I should have on the tiebreaker run. Dropping one point on the main match moved me down 8 places in the overall standards, so a 0.5% difference in score making a 5% change in overall placement. There were a lot of great shooters there and the level of competition continues to get tougher and tougher each year.

Karl’s target: 199/200. Dropping one point in the main match cost me 8 places in the overall finish.

But Wait There’s More!

Stay tuned for future posts, as I share some pics and content from sessions I attended, video from the sessions I taught, and some shootoff video. TacCon is always a very full 3 days. My reports from TacCon 2018 (both the Arkansas and Northwest Regional conferences) and TacCon 2019 are still online also.