Competitive Shooter Jessie Duff

Competitive Shooter Jessie Duff

Jimissa Hernandez

University of La Verne

Sports Psychology

Nur Bandek

November 5, 2015

Nancy Lopez, an American professional golfer, once said "Do your best, one shot at a time, and then move on." This quote relates well to my favorite athlete and one of the most accomplished competitive shooters in the world, Jessie Duff. She has become one of the most influential women in the entire sport of shooting. The amount of accomplishments that she has worked for and achieved have surpassed many athletes, men and women included.

Unfortunately I haven’t known about Jessie Duff for a long period of time. Nor do I have a certain special connection with her or her love of shooting. She became my favorite athlete because of the sport that she participates in. I love shooting, the sport of shooting and the athletes that participate in it. When we were asked to pick our favorite female athlete, I didn’t really have anybody in mind that I thought doing a paper on would be actually interesting. I immediately looked up female competitive shooters and found Jessie Duff instantly. The first thing that caught my eye about her was that when I first began to look her up, every website mentioned that she was one of the most accomplished competitive shooters in the world. Reading that same opinion about her repeatedly made me really interested in learning all that there is to know about her love and skill for the game.

Although as great as she is in her sport, there wasn’t much that I could find about her history or personal life. Many of the things I found out about her had to deal with all of the tournaments and competitions that she has won. I won’t go into detail about the competitions that she has won over the past decade but I do think that it is worth mentioning just a little about her earnings. In the past eleven years that she has been competitively shooting, she has won eighty championships. Eleven of those came from 2015 alone, nine from 2014, five from 2013 and 2006, eight from 2012, 2011, 2010 and 2008, seven from 2009, ten from 2007 and one from 2005.

Duff began shooting at an unspecified young age with her father, who was also a world champion competitive shooter. One of the things that makes her my favorite is that she was the first woman to earn the title rank of Grand Master. She was the first woman to hold the highest rank in practical shooting. The USPSA, The United States Practical Shooting Association, ranks Grand Master as “the highest rating a shooter can achieve.” To earn that rank, she needed to have an average higher than 95% in shooting courses. After achieving her Grand Master rank she said, “I am honored to have earned the designation of Grand Master with USPSA. This is something I have been working toward my entire shooting career and I’ve come this far thanks to a lot of hard work and a lot of support.” The executive director of USPSA, Kim Williams, was quoted saying this about Jessie, “Jessie is one of the best shooters in the world, USPSA is proud to announce her historic record as the first woman to ever reach this ranking in Practical Shooting.” Jessie has been participating professionally in her sport for eleven years. Though she began shooting because of her dad and older brother when she was just a child, she didn’t start shooting competitively until she was fifteen.

Jessie Duff has a very soft spoken and elegant personality. The way that she speaks and carries herself clearly signify that she was raised in a southern, respectful home. When she is teaching about gun usage, shooting and while being interviewed she consistently has a smile on her face and she laughs a lot. To me, this shows that she didn’t have any type of coach or influential figure demean her accomplishments or belittle her abilities. It would be safe to say that she is aware of how good of a shooter she is, but she doesn’t have the personality that amplifies it or boasts about it constantly. That also signifies that she was also taught to take her winnings gracefully and to stay humble. In her radio interview with Larry Rea-An she mentioned that her dad and brother got her to go shooting with them and they were very influential in her early years of technique learning. What makes her such a great athlete is that it would be easy to run into her in the streets and have no clue that she is a consecutive world renowned competitive shooter champion winner because she simply doesn’t look or act the part. Jessie Duff is a very classy and well put together woman. She mentions her husband, Matt Duff, who is also a champion competitive shooter and a retired MLB pro baseball player, multiple times in her interviews. With as much as she talks about Matt it shows how close they are and how much she relies on him for his love and support. Another thing that I love about Jessie is that she is a very well-rounded individual. The most shocking thing that she mentioned in her interview was that she was a cheerleader in high school. I love that she isn’t what people would typically think of when they think a dedicated champion competitive shooter. What I love most about Jessie and the biggest reason that I now look up to her is because of her dedication and support that she puts behind the Constitution and The Second Amendment. She mentions in her interview that her and her husband love what they do so much because they want to do whatever they can to stand up and show their support for The Second Amendment.

When Jessie is prepping for an interview or a public speaking, she spends a significant amount of time doing research on the topic to make sure that she speaks knowledgeably and correctly. She has been spending a lot of time in the past few years speaking out on the bans that the government wants to put on guns, especially the AR-15. In a news interview about five guns, the bullets that they shoot, and the way she shoots them, she spent three days preparing the guns and making sure that she would be able to speak continuously and knowledgably about all of them. The way that she defends the guns and our gun rights shows that she was brought up to always defend and protect what she loves. Which she does clearly when it comes to defending the Second.

Before she begins shooting and in between her shooting, which is called the middle game, she tries to constantly block out everything. She works on not looking at her target, the person next to her, or the next string. She mentions that as soon as the timer she goes off, her mind is completely blank because she knows that if she has anything on her mind while she is trying to shoot, that’s when she makes a lot of mistakes. She works hard to self-motivate in those moments before and in-between her shooting competitions. Jessie is a professional at practicing and displaying “The 4 C’s” that are usually considered as the basis for a good sportsman. Those four C’s are concentration, confidence, control and commitment. In order to achieve this qualities she uses a lot of relaxation and self-centering. She also uses a lot of mental imagery by always trying to picture the situations that she will be in for her competitions. Jessie Duff definitely shows a lot of self-efficacy. She does so in her continuous ability to believe in herself and push herself as hard as she needs to in order to go far. She is easily able to exert control over her motivation and behavior.