Oregon Shooter

Point Shooting with Sweatnbullets (aka, Roger Phillips) Jan. 2007

Posted: January 19, 2006 | Last Updated: June 06, 2009

I recently had the great pleasure to spend 2 days (16 hours) with Roger Phillips in Las Vegas, NV. for some excellent 1:1 training and wanted to pass along my impressions of it.

Anyway, I’m back and just wanted to say that Roger has some good stuff going on in Nevada that people should get in on before its too late!

You probably know already that he is now a Special Instructor for Suarez International and will soon be running regular classes instead of what I got which was a completely tailored learning experience. 

Roger said he still wants to teach this way when he can, but I’m gonna warn ya now, in a few years he will be very busy and getting 1:1 for a complete weekend is not going to be easy IMO so get the training while its available and inexpensive!

Roger was the perfect host and went way beyond what should be expected of an instructor without a second thought. 

One example would be the fact that he volunteered to pick me up at the airport when my plane was late saving me the cost of a cab to the dinner we had planned on having that night to get aquatinted.

Another was that he also picked me up and dropped me off at my hotel each day which was not mentioned in our arrangements and assumed that I would have a car or (as I planned) would pay for cab fares each day.

But the extra effort that I appreciated the most was on the second day of training when he brought twice the amount of coffee when the previous day’s shortage was THE ONLY complaint I could muster up.

Roger is the first “point-shooting teacher” that I have trained with but the one thing that I really liked was that everything he taught me filled in spaces that my “modern technique” training had left gaps in and did not require that I unlearn a previous method of solving a problem.

My training until last year was all based on MT and had been developed through competitive shooting sports.  From 10 yards and out, I felt I had a handle on the sight continuum from years of IPSC/IDPA and went in search of filling my training gap that I saw as 3 yards and in, or what is commonly called ECQC (Extreme Close Quarters Combat) techniques. 

That range was covered very well in my recent class of the same name with “SouthNarc” of http://shivworks.com in Portland, OR. 

SouthNarc’s class covered the close in stuff but there was still a hole in the training when it came to the middle ranges of 2-7 yards or that area that is too far for hands on yet not far enough for MT applications.  This area is where Roger’s material really shines and where point-shooting fits nicely into the complete fighting package IMO.

Roger is a very detail oriented person and it shows in his postings on the internet, but I was happy to see that he is not one of those instructors that get lost on tangents while teaching.

His instructions of techniques and his explanations of “why” something works the way it does were so thorough that I can not remember asking for further explanation. 

I remember Roger asking if I understood because I was not asking questions at one point and I reassured him that he was explaining it so well that every question I may have entertained was being answered before I proceeded to doing the technique.  You can’t ask for more than that (as a student or teacher) can you?

I was really impressed that Roger never ran out of material in the 2 days I was there.  I mean we covered every angle and movement you can imagine in the 2-7 and sometimes out to 9 yard range, and I never felt like I was doing one rep more than was needed to “own” the technique.

I hesitate to even mention the round count because I fear people will not believe that you can shoot 3K rounds in 10 hours without resorting to “throwing lead,” but it is true in this case.  The 3K was suppose to last all weekend, but went fast because each drill Roger would push me to MY limit via speed or distance or a combination of the two until we saw the limit via the groupings spreading out.  I then would run another rep of the drill, taking just a little off the speed to make sure I had the right combo and could walk away from it knowing where my limitation was and having confidence in my hits at it.

The first day was spent developing a limited visual input “sight picture” in static positions.  The second added movement and with the additional 1K of 9mm we got from Wally-World the night before, I began learning how easy it is to get combat hits with rapid movement while maintaining a 98%+ hit ratio.

I’m not sure one can appreciate the speed factor unless they do a little FoF with it, but a fraction of a second and the terminal effect that a hit can have should not be underrated when developing your shooting continuum, again IMO.

There is a lot more that I could describe about the weekend, but I won’t go into the specifics of the course or the extra curricular training (rifle) that I really appreciated getting from Roger, because this post is getting long already.

Suffice it to say that I am very happy with the new found skills and highly recommend that anyone able get out to Vegas and train with this man!!!

PS.  I first considered Roger for training this year when during a heated review of DR. Middlebrooks FistFire book I made the statement that an instructor should be able to backup his teachings.  Roger challenged me with something similar to the following… “if after training with me you do not feel you got your moneys worth, you can pay me what you think it was worth.”

He was true to form and asked me on the way back to town the second night if I needed any money back?  My response was no, but that I was not going to pay him what the class was worth either, meaning I got a bargain and then some!

PPS.  I took one video during the class for reference.  It was a right step off and to the rear movement that turned into an arc.  At this point I was visualizing an opportunity to close and did so with two sighted head shots in the first run.  I ran it again (went to SL this time) to see if the group would stay consistent and it did.

Don’t let the video bias you, it’s just one drill and this is after 14 hours of the only PS training I’ve ever done.

(10 body, 2 head)

(5 body, reload, 6-7 to body)

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