From Leading Lady to Grand Master

Am Shooting Journal ^ | 1/19/2017 | C Hodgkins

[w1n1]

With multiple championships across five disciplines, Team Taurus Captain Jessie Duff may be the most versatile competition shooter active today.
If you are of a certain age, you’ll recall a time when Jessie Duff was not winning shooting championships. But to the generation of competitors coming of age today, her name is as familiar atop an event leader board as a sponsor’s logo. From her first championship in 2005 to her most recent, the captain of Team Taurus has toted home the victor's hardware nearly 150 times, often with wins in multiple divisions of the same competition.

What makes this gaudy total even more impressive is that in an age of overspecialization, she’s achieved her competitive milestones across five different shooting disciplines and multiple event types.

BORN INTO A SHOOTING FAMILY in McDonough, Ga., a community in the Atlanta metropolitan area, Duff didn't immediately follow in the footsteps of her father, a competitive shooter in his own right. "I didn't take to it early on," she told me recently, "even though I grew up on the range with my dad, my mom and my brother. I'd shoot on the range with them, but didn't feel the need to compete until I was about 15." Her dad was involved in cowboy action shooting at the time, so that’s where she began too. The urge to compete may have come a bit late for Duff, whose only experience with organized sports was as a cheerleader, but the timing was clearly right.

"I just found my niche," she recalled. "Team sports weren't for me, but I found something that I was good at and could grow and get better at. I just needed to find it on my own instead of feeling forced to do it."

"When I came into the modern shooting sports, the ladies who were killing it at the time were Kay Miculek and Lisa Munson and Julie Golob and Athena Lee, and that's what I wanted to do. When I say I set my goal to beat them, I mean that with the utmost respect because they were the best. I wanted to be at their level or better. It took me a while, because they're so good, but eventually I made my way into the sport and found a place among the other top ladies."

Shooting multiple disciplines over the past decade has enabled Duff to identify how to train and what to work on. And for her, it is all about focusing on what she considers to be the basics, and then migrating those skills from event to event.

"The common denominator across all of it is sight alignment and trigger control," she said. "If you can manage that, then the rest is just going to come with repetition, muscle memory and physical fitness. Shooting is shooting, whether you’re going super fast at Steel Challenge, whether you're going super slow but being extremely accurate at Bianchi, or USPSA where it's a mix of both, but you add in running, and a physical aspect. You still have to line your sights up and not jerk the trigger." Read the rest Jessie Duff story here.

[wbarmy]

She uses one of those special holsters and is able to clear the holster very fast.

In AFG, most of the guys had spring loaded holsters to push the weapon into their hands faster. I used a velcro soft holster across my chest and I always beat them on steel on steel challenges. I think the real determinator was practice. They expected the holster to give them the advantage, I practiced drawing and firing until the motion was second nature.

I put the holster on my chest because I was behind the wheel of a lot of soft bodied trucks while driving around the frontier. Made the whole action really easy, especially if I did not draw but fired through the soft holster.

[fatboy]

Thanks for the post.

I have come to the point in my life where I really want to be competitive in action pistol shooting. Probably going to concentrate on steel shooting. To that end I’ve made the personal commitment to dry fire every day even if it’s only for 5 minutes, to follow a structured training program and to shoot live as much as possible.

To that end I’m (1) week into what I call my 100 days if training. The hope is that once outdoor shooting starts back up some of my fellow competitors will notice a difference. I hope. I’m trying to absorb as much information as possible on several related areas such as ammo development, equipment selection and mental mindset.

Owning a gun is easy, being a good marksmen takes a lot of work.

[TXnMA]

Feminazis — eat your hearts out!

[NorthMountain]

Her rig there illustrates whey I’m not a fan of IPSC/USPSA ... They left “practical” in their rearview mirror years ago.