Reflecting on the 2025 Season: Highlights, Accomplishments and Bragging Rights

Jeff Fifield
Dec 7, 2025
8 min read

What can I say about 2025 other that WOW! What an incredibly fulfilling season for all of us at Cheshire County Action Pistol. 2024 laid the groundwork and 2025 smashed all expectations, we now know that we are a legitimate presence in New England Practical Shooting. We have hosted competitors from New Jersey to Maine and out to New York state. Put on two incredibly successful charity matches with close to $57,000 in raffle prizes that raised almost $22,000 for area charities that use practical shooting to support Veterans, Police Officers and their families in need. For the 2025 season we are proud to have supported Aiming For Zero and the Hero Down Foundation!

April 13th brought about our first match of the season and this is the point where we knew we were in for something special. April in New Hampshire is still a beast of a month but we all were feeling the same urge to get outside and throw some lead down range. Our setup crew came together to put together six stages and 85 of New England's best practical shooters gathered to run them. All of our big names arrived in typical fashion. The camaraderie had returned. Laughter, banter and gun shots once again filled the Ferry Brook Range, setting the bar high for all the matches to come.

Two weeks later, we rolled out the Steel Challenge carts and assembled six stages of quick reflex fun. Fifty talented shooters challenged the cold misty weather to calm the itchy trigger fingers that had been waiting all winter. Six Grand Master Steel Challenge competitors gunned up and launched our SCSA season into motion. Derek, Joseph, Alecia, Gino, Dat, Squirrel and so many more all performed amazingly. The dedication involved to get to the Grand Master level is unfathomable. Simply put, these shooters are seriously fast.

October 3rd-5th, Cheshire County Shooting Sports Education Foundation hosted our first ever ten stage match supporting Aiming For Zero. Ten national level stages designed by Kyle Narkum, who has become a household name for stage design in New England and beyond. We are grateful to have him grace us with his talents for stage planning. Our awesome crew stood out during setup, putting in 23 hours over the two days leading up to the match. Together we built a match to be proud of. Saturday and Sunday brought us perfect weather and squads full of incredible people who also happen to be great shooters. When the dust settled, we had given away $28,000 worth of prizes and raised $13,330 for Aiming For Zero! Matrix Arms was back for a third year in a row to donate their new MX-C compact carry pistol to the raffle. This year, we welcomed Q LLC with a Sugar Weasel rifle! Both of these were regular raffle prizes that anyone could win just by buying a ticket and dropping it in the bucket!

Friday the 3rd was the staff shoot day. We made sure any kinks were ironed out before the main match that weekend. We had our chance to run through the stages and they were nothing short of incredible. There were short burner stages, long memory stages and everything in between. Start positions kept things spicy and we even had a visual start on a crazy burner stage. Stage 8 was definitely one of my favorites (even though I blew up my gun.) This stage was over forty yards wide with windows, hard leans, and one target that was forgotten by about 40% of shooters. Up to this point, I had never been more proud of a match or our crew who baked out in the sun for up to five days to make sure the competitors had the best time. All weekend we heard nothing but positive feedback, things like, "Favorite match of the year," and, "Hardest match of my life." All things that make what we do worth it and keep the passion burning to do bigger and better things.

It was at this match we were proud to Beta test the Hero Down Foundation's Project Green and Project Blue. Projects Green and Blue are part of a new initiative by the Hero Down Foundation to introduce more military members, Veterans and Police to practical shooting and help bridge a gap between tactical training and practical shooting. More and more tactical trainers are finally seeing the value in practical shooting and are adding it to their curriculum, but there are many that still feel practical shooting is a game that has no benefit. Johnny and Hero Down are doing their part to bridge this gap by sponsoring Military/Veteran shooters through Project Green and Police Officers through Project Blue. Once sponsored through either Project Green or Blue the shooter will be paired with a competitive shooter as a coach that has been carefully vetted to be sure they can not only coach the shooter through the matches but also make sure they are enjoying themselves while they are there. Hero Down sponsored ten shooters and coaches at the Aiming For Zero match where they shot the ten stages together and all of the feedback was extremely positive. Most of those ten shooters were here to compete in the Hero Down Triple Crown the next month.

2025 HERO DOWN TRIPLE

CROWN FINALE!

Another first this year is the introduction of Triple Crown Series by Johnny O'Brien and the Hero Down Foundation. This is a three match series that started with Crown 1 in Granby Mass, Crown 2 in Berwick Maine, and the Championship, Crown 3 match, in Keene New Hampshire. In this series the shooters accumulate points for each match and the top three shooters at the end of the series get trophies and bragging rights until next season. Another new feature of the series is the Super Squad upgrade. If a shooter placed in the top 8 at a crown match, they get a coupon code for a reduced registration fee and a slot in the Super Squad. All of this is brought to the outside world by Alex Gay and his incredible team at TrueSot Media Group (you have undoubtedly seen his work in the shooting community this year).

Crown One kicked the series off in Granby Mass on May 26th. 67 Competitors battled it out through four massive Kyle Narkum stages to set the tone for the season. Cheshire County Action Pistol had a handful of our team at the match and we had a ton of fun. At the end of Crown One, Zac Camacho took 1st place, Kyle Narkum was a close 2nd and Sean Janicki finished 3rd! Thank you to Angel, Matt and all of the Granby team for hosting a great Crown One!

Crown Two in Berwick Maine took place on a very hot August 10th. 64 competitors encountered seven more of Kyle's finest stages. It's great to see folks travelling from one end of New England to the other to shoot these matches and support the Hero Down Foundation. Josh Rich and his crew put on a great match that certainly did Berwick proud! Crown Two had Sean Janicki finishing on top, Frank Carr in second and third place to Matt Gay.

Crown Three. The Finale. Keene NH, November 9th!

Cheshire County was honored to host the Hero Down Triple Crown Championship and could not be more thankful to cap our season off with such an incredible event. Our crew did what they do and set-up seven of Kyle's absolute best ever stages that put 96 shooters through just about every challenging scenario possible. Saturday's set-up was a little chilly in the morning but turned out to be a beautiful day for everyone to construct these amazing stages. Sunday, on the other hand, wasn't so cooperative. Mother nature decided to add to the challenges with more cold and some rain thrown in the mix. The crew showed up by 7:00 am and got to work stapling up and bagging targets, hanging banners and getting everything ready for the competitors to enjoy a day of non-stop fun and fundraising for the Hero Down Foundation. Raffles were spread out, iPads were set-up and synched, every detail gone through over and over. We were ready.

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Shortly after 7:00. a convoy of vehicles started to arrive and our parking lot quickly saw more vehicles than it ever had at one time. Registration opened at 8:00 and they wanted plenty of time to walk the stages knowing Kyle had some nasty tricks up his sleeve. After all of the competitors get checked in, everyone got a care package of Dos Boot AR mag extensions from Die Free Company. Time for the Marine Corps band to play our National Anthem over the loud speaker to kick-off the opening speech from Johnny and I got the fun job of administering the safety briefing. Masshole Firearms set-up with their new enclosed trailer and booth to show off all the cool stuff they have been doing and stepping up huge to support the cause with a custom Glock all done up by them and Teflon Customs for the raffle! Colt Firearms was there and added a certificate for a King Cobra revolver to the raffle! Needless to say the raffle table was stacked with more than $29,000 worth of raffle prizes! We cannot thank all of our sponsors enough and there is a full list of our sponsors from the whole season at the bottom of the page. If you are looking for anything that the sponsors provide I ask you to please try them first and show them some love, without their amazing support we would not have been able to make this kind of impact.

We came, we shot, we ate hamburgers, donated a ton of cash to charities and when the gun smoke cleared, we crowned a champion. The talent pool that assembled in our little shooting range was massive. Big names and quick triggers, the trophies could have gone to any of the top shooters. But in the end it was Kyle Narkum that brought home the Crown, Zac Camacho coming in second and Luther Hyslop securing the third position. So many shooters did such an amazing job.

None of this could have been done with our volunteers

Thank you.

Ed Cormier Mark Demarest

George Oross Bill Stearns

Jeff Brown Mark Maynard

Jim Brubaker Kyle Johnson

JT Messinese Adam Colombie

Hillary Steiner Glenn Skoog

Jim Steiner Kyle Narkum

Gwen Steiner Rick Barker

Craig Campbell Walter Lewandowski

Liz Parker Jason Parker

Rob Vallante Ron Hitchings

2025 SEASON BY THE NUMBERS

Steel Challenge had 7 matches with 515 individual participants.

PCSL had Six Regular Matches

Two Charity Matches

719 Individual Participants

Approximately $57,000 in raffle prizes.

Estimated $22,000 donated to Veterans and

Police Officer Charities.

1,016 entries to matches.

105 total stages.

We are very proud to have

sent approximately

189,650 rounds

down range.

As we write this, it is December of 2025. The year has flown by and we are extremely proud of our accomplishments. But now is not the time to rest. This years victories were conceived in the cold months of last winter. You, our shooters, participants, loyal followers and patrons can rest assured that we are home plotting out ways to enhance the shooter experience in the future. After all, the next match is only nineteen weeks away.