IDPA

We no longer support this sport.

 

Here's why:

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The first Swiss IDPA club was founded in 2015 by me, Andy Pfenninger. I brought the know-how about the sport back from South Africa.

 

I established the IDPA Intro Course for new shooters, organized more and more matches and the number of members and clubs kept growing. At the peak we had several hundred shooters and a dozen clubs in our small country. Early on, we started to organize a yearly National Championship competition and that match grew from a club match with about 50 participants to what probably was the largest sanctioned match in IDPA history in the world so far.

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However, IDPA has made many changes to the rules and to the way it is operating over the last years. Changes, that were often made without discernible reasons and without any explanations. The sport became complicated and in many cases, the rules were contradictory. At large matches, discussions about whether a particular stage was legal or what a shooter actually was allowed to do or not, took up huge amounts of time and delayed events without adding any value.

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Even basic firearms safety principles got neglected: widely accepted range safety rules that prohibit unsafe behavior such as for example covering body parts with the muzzle or negligent discharges were suddenly rejected for sanctioned matches.

 

It became increasingly difficult and time-consuming to get a match through the in-transparent and random sanctioning process. It wasted a lot of time and energy without any benefit. In many cases, the reviewers were unable to base their change requests on actual rules but they would still persist on them. Match approvals depended more on personal liking and favors than on the written rules.

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We made many efforts and suggested reasonable and well thought-through improvements to the sport. The input was based on feedback of many experienced Match Directors from around the world. But it was not even acknowledged.

 

After the big Ultra Match in May 2023, I decided to write a complaint about the wasteful sanctioning process and the complete lack of support, bordering on obstruction, by certain official IDPA representatives. But the IDPA leadership does not take criticism well. Instead of addressing the issues, they suspended my membership. The official reason was given as not following the stage design rules. IDPA lacked to give concrete facts such as what stages and what rules were involved. They did not explain how those unknown stages had passed through the sanctioning process both on paper and on the range and still somehow be illegal. In fact, they didn't provide any detail at all. Neither did they make any effort to speak to me before or after the ban.

 

Collaboration between SwissAAA and IDPA therefore ended abruptly. Our huge investments in sportsmanship, education, promotion and match organization were obviously not appreciated at all. We will not pursue any further activities involving IDPA or support that sport in the future in any way. 

 

If you are interested in dynamic sports shooting, we strongly recommend to have a look at CMA instead. It's a much better way, made for shooters by shooters!