How I got started in competitions...

My Dad was a shotgun guy...if you ask him what he could have for the one gun....it'd be a 12 gauge Remington. When he was younger he shot the the 870 and as he aged he moved to the lighter recoiling 1187. Bottom line was the man could shoot and that only got better as he got older. We would go out bird hunting and he'd pull off some ridiculous shot like doves on the wing at 60 yards while I would eat through boxes of shells....single shot by painful single shot and come up with nothing. So I was introduced to sporting clays as my Dad couldn't bear the sight of sky blasters 'r' us. Somewhere in the first 5000 rounds I discovered that this was not for me. I would go and put in a round of 100 or two every Sunday and pray to go to the pistol range afterward. It didn't stop there as we soon started shooting competitions to hone our skills further and I was winning. I switched over to an 1100 but it was not to be, I was bored with clays and the fire for pistol shooting had already been lit. So began the dabbling in handguns and possibly the biggest waste of brass in a lifetime. I still have a hard time with how much brass I have thrown away in life as we did not reload. As any good rebellious son I went exactly 180 degrees from my Dad's interest which was revolvers. I wanted I had to have a 9mm of which my uncle had two. I schemed, I pleaded, I did everything I could think of to get my hands on a bonafide 9mm. All of this to no avail, "Revolvers are more reliable and safer. You could get hurt with a pistol like that." My Dad tried and tried to get his only son to love revolvers as much as he did. I got a 9mm finally...well actually my Mom did, but I spent all summer working in a glass shop polishing up expensive things with Windex and paper towels to earn the $489. It was a Glock 19 and it was great and it was mine. I can still remember the way it smelled out of the box and how neat it looked and how incredible it felt to fire the first rounds out of it.  Fast forward 10,000 rounds and ten years later. I got back into shooting competitions on a whim at a local range weekday match. The gun was the very same G19 and my eyes were forever opened. The thing that killed my auto usage was the brass....The G19 didn't last long and I soon found out .45's were more fun and also more expensive to shoot. I got so frustrated with all the brass that i was losing at the matches that I went made the best mistake ever: I traded off an auto for a used 625JM Smith and Wesson revolver. I can still hear my father laughing and saying I told you so.  That was four or five revolvers ago.