2011 SHOT Show Recap

What an amazing time we had at SHOT Show! SHOT Show was held January 18-22, 2011 at the Sands Convention Center in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. Co-Founder Marty Morris, Manager Jeanie Wheeler, Pro-Staffers Dave West and Laura Rice and guest Kristi Greer all attended.

We flew in on Tuesday, January 18 to Las Vegas. After checking into our hotel, we headed over to the convention. If you have never experienced SHOT Show, it is a sight to be seen. It is the place to be in the outdoor industry with thousands of booths from thousands of vendors from all over the world! You get to see new items and feel a little bad when you realize you can’t take any of the firearms or ammunition on display back home. But, it is really great to see the new products from industry standards like Remington and Smith & Wesson to new, cool products that are not even in stores yet.

Seeing all the new items is not my favorite portion of SHOT Show, though. The networking and celebrity sights are quite possibly the best aspect of SHOT Show. We met up with our friend, Pro-Staff member and Outdoor Channel Outfitters host, Neal Rohrbach for the first time. This is just the first of the well-known people we met. We also ran into Ted Nugent, Michael Waddell, The Duck Commanders, Jim Shockey, Jim Zumbo, Lee and Tiffany Lakosky, Craig Morgan, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Steven Segall, Colorado Buck, Kelly Gotch, Manny Puig, Mike Irvine and John Stephens.

The highlights of SHOT Show always seem to be the parties. On Wednesday, we attended the Sportsman Channel party. Free food, drinks and great company are always around. We even watched personal friend of Marty Morris, John Stephens of RNT Calls, accept his award. We left before the party got too far out of hand, or else we closed the party down. The details are a little sketchy right now, but it was a blast!

On Thursday we attended the Outdoor Channel’s 11th annual Golden Moose Awards were hosted by Willie Robertson. And what an entertaining evening it was! Pro-Staffer Laura Rice even had a nice photo opportunity with Willie himself, as she did her own rendition of his infamous beard! We watched one of our favorite outdoorsmen “Uncle” Ted Nugent accept the first annual Lightning Rod award. Manny Piug and Sheri Daye also accepted In The Line of Fire awards, Puig for losing a finger to a rattlesnake and Daye for a pretty nasty spear gun accident. A reminder of how outdoor fun can go wrong, even for professionals.

With the parties over, the convention wrapped up Friday afternoon. Needless to say, we were ready to go home and come back and rest up to do it again next year!