IDPA

This sport is no longer supported by us.

 

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 here 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, rules were contradictory. At large matches, discussions about whether a particular stage was legal or what a shooter actually was supposed to do, took up huge amounts of time and delayed events with no real benefit.

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Even basic firearms safety principles got neglected: widely accepted range safety rules that prohibited 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 and did not add any value. In many cases, the reviewers were unable to base their change requests on actual rules but they would still persist on them. A match approvals depended more on personal liking and favors than on the rule book.

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We made many efforts and suggested reasonable and well thought-through changes 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. They banned me. The official reason was given as not following the rules in stage design. They lacked to give concrete facts such as what stages and what rules were involved. They did not explain how those unknown stages could pass through the sanctioning on paper and on the range and still somehow be illegal. In fact, they didn't provide any detail. Neither did they speak to me before or after the ban.

 

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