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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 negligent discharges were rejected for sanctioned matches. It became increasingly difficult and time-consuming to get matches through the complicated and random sanctioning process that did not add any value. All of this made investing in and promoting the sport less and less attractive.

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We made many efforts and suggested reasonable and well thought-through changes to the sport but most of them were not even acknowledged. After the big Ultra Match in May 2023, we decided to write a complaint about the wasteful sanctioning process and the more than lacking support by some official IDPA representatives. 

 

But the IDPA association does not tolerate criticism and thus collaboration between SwissAAA and IDPA has become impossible. Our huge investments in sportsmanship, education, promotion and match organization were not appreciated at all. We will therefore not pursue any further activities involving IDPA in the future.

 

If you are interested in dynamic sports shooting, we strongly recommend to have a look at CMA instead. 

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