What happens when two elite competitive shooters reach the top through completely different paths? Randi Rogers began shooting at just 11 years old alongside her grandparents in Cowboy Action Shooting, competing under the unforgettable alias “Holy Terror.” Shooting became almost second nature, and over the next 28 years she accumulated more than 85 world and national titles across nine different shooting disciplines. Gordon Carrell's journey couldn't have looked more different. After years of football, pole vaulting, rock climbing, hiking, hunting, and other athletic pursuits, Gordon entered competitive handgun shooting in his mid-thirties. He quickly began applying lessons from athletics, physical education, movement, mental performance, and eventually detailed performance analysis to figure out exactly where shooters gain or lose time. Together, their contrasting approaches create a fascinating lesson in how shooting skill is actually developed. In this episode of Making Shooters Better, we dig into why many shooters misunderstand speed. Gordon explains that meaningful improvements often aren't found by pulling the trigger faster, but by eliminating unnecessary movement, hesitation, inefficient transitions, poor positioning, and tiny pauses between actions. Randi adds another piece: eliminate mistakes. Missing targets, poorly planned reloads, forgetting stage elements, and failing to analyze previous performances can cost far more time than fractions of a second gained through raw shooting speed. Her experience across multiple disciplines also illustrates just how much shooters can learn simply by carefully watching other competitors. We also explore the mental side of competition. Gordon shares the lesson he learned from legendary shooter Rob Leatham about conserving mental energy during long matches, along with his own method for reframing nervousness as preparation rather than something negative. Randi takes a different approach. When she reaches the line, she narrows everything down to one simple internal cue: “Sights. Sights. Sights.” Different mental strategies. Same objective: get the conscious mind out of the way and allow trained skills to perform. Then comes one of the most valuable training discussions of the episode. Gordon argues that many shooters practice what they're already good at because success feels good. His philosophy is almost the opposite: practice should deliberately push you beyond your existing comfort zone, then analyze why each repetition succeeded or failed. Instead of hoping you've improved, create baselines. Measure your draw. Measure your transitions. Measure your splits. Record your movement. Study your video. Then compare what you actually did against what you're capable of doing. As Gordon puts it, practice makes permanent. Poor repetitions simply make poor habits more durable. Randi provides the perfect counterbalance. Her ability to watch a movement and reproduce it almost instinctively comes from decades of observing other shooters, beginning with her grandfather. It's a reminder that improvement doesn't happen only when we're pulling the trigger. Watching, visualizing, analyzing, and mentally rehearsing can all become part of training. And then there's the minor complication that these two champions happen to be married. We get into competition between spouses, learning when to coach each other, and the surprisingly useful rule they've developed whenever one begins talking about a problem: “Do you want me to listen, or do you want me to offer advice?” Possibly the most marriage-saving shooting technique ever discussed on this podcast. Ultimately, this episode isn't really about trophies. It's about deliberate improvement. Whether you're a competitive shooter, defensive shooter, instructor, or simply someone trying to become more capable with a firearm, Randi and Gordon offer a remarkably practical blueprint: Train consistently. Work on weaknesses. Get outside your comfort zone. Measure performance. Analyze what happened. And never confuse doing more repetitions with actually getting better. Because sometimes the fastest way to become a better shooter is to slow down long enough to figure out what's costing you time.
