IDPA

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

 

We 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 of the growth 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 match in Europe if not in the world.

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However, IDPA has made many changes to the rules and to the way it is operating in the last years.

Changes were often made without clear reasons and without any explanations. The sport became complicated and contradictory to a point, where discussions about whether a particular stage was legal or what a shooter actually was supposed to do, took up a lot more time than actually doing the shooting.

Even basic firearms safety principles got neglected: formerly accepted range safety rules that prohibited unsafe behavior such as for example covering body parts with the muzzle or accidental and negligent discharges were rejected for sanctioned matches. It became increasingly difficult and time-consuming to get matches through the complicated and unpredictable sanctioning process that did not add any value. All of this made investing in and promoting the sport less and less attractive.

 

The IDPA association does not tolerate much criticism and the collaboration between SwissAA and IDPA has become impossible. SwissAAA will therefore not pursue any activities involving IDPA anymore. If you are looking for a dynamic shooting sport, we strongly recommend to join CMA instead.