I answered you on the
www.tssa.net board but I'll post here as well for anyone else who cares.
I attended some of the very first FDCC matches in Lake City. I don't think many of the core group remember me being there, but I shot a FAL most of the time (some of them will remember said FAL from the 3 year match
).
I moved to Broward County in 2001, and in 2003 attempted to start up an SFDCC club. At the time I was starting this, I found out that there had been a previous attempt at an FDCC-S a year or so prior. I was not a part of that club. Both clubs shot at Pop's place out on 27 (a private property, private hunt club). Other than that I don't know much about the FDCC-S or what killed it.
My attempt, the SFDCC, was essentially started by myself and two other members of
www.floridashootersnetwork.com. We shot once a month, and were amassing a decent collection of targets, barricades, and other props. One of our founders has pretty good welding and other fabrication skills and made up quite a few running targets, as well as reactionary targets that dropped when you shot a balloon concealed behind a t-shirt etc. We had the use of a small storage shed at the range to keep alot of this gear in. The 6 or so shoots we had were limited to about 6-8 shooters while we tried things out and worked on the logistics. We fully intended to open up enrollment at some point. Our membership was limited to those that came to at least one of the 3 range cleanup days we had where we hauled an ungodly amount of trash away, and literally raked the entire range from the berm back 100 yards to the covered shooting position.
It failed for us for several reasons.
1) The range. Several of the regulars complained about us taking up the range on Saturday mornings. This despite the fact that we were paying to reserve the range. We were asked to move the shoots to the afternoon. The problem was/is that this is South Florida, and afternoons in the summer (which is when we were doing this) are both damn hot and usually rainy.
2) Membership. Our decision to limit the membership both helped and hurt. It helped in that we all got to shoot. It hurt in that there were very few people to help reset targets. If you've got the shooter coming off the line, and the shooter coming on, and the scorekeeper and the timer, that really only leaves you with 2 guys to reset.
3) Props/targets. Our targets were very ambitious. They were virtually all either movers or reactive, and they virtually all wore t-shirts and required a balloon to be fastened in some shape or form. There were many bugs to be worked out, and very few people helping.
4) Course design. There were essentially 3 of us working out course design. It got a bit tedious, and alot of the courses got very ammo intensive. People were literally running through 3-4 mags on a course, in part due to the more realistic nature of our reactive targets. Unfortunately in the shooting sports, fun and reset time are on inverse curves. You want to maximize the fun factor, while still keeping the time between shooters to a minimum.
5) Infighting. This is as much my fault as anyone else's. The target designer and myself did not see eye-to-eye. I wanted to keep the targets and barricades very simple in the beginning so that we could work on all of the logistics. This was advice I had gotten from Newarguy about him starting up the original FDCC. Our target designer did not agree. He thought we should have fun and interesting courses of fire, and work out the logistics later.
I probably could go on and on but oh well. I am trying to put together another meet & eat for the SoFla crowd to discuss giving this another go. If you're interested grab me at one of the
www.tssa.net matches, or sign up
over here and let us know what day of the week words best for you.