CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Over 500 students from 49 West Virginia schools will be at full draw this weekend in West Virginia’s capital city. The 11th annual Archery in Schools State Tournament is Saturday at the Charleston Civic Center.
Interest in the program has exploded from its introduction in West Virginia in 2005. The inaugural year there were 12 West Virginia schools involved. Today the program has expanded to over 300 schools and continues to grow. Demand for instructors couldn’t be higher.
“We are to the point now that we have 18 DNR law enforcement and wildlife personnel who are certified as Level 2 basic archery instructor trainers,” said Krista Snodgrass, Special Projects Coordinator for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. “They can now train school personnel as basic archery instructors.”
The program is available for elementary, middle, and high schools in the state. Each school needs at least one certified instructor and must come up with the funding to launch the program. The initial cost is about $3,100 according to Snodgrass.
“That gets them 12 bows, five targets, arrows, a net, and a repair kit,” she said. “There are some grants available which I can help them with to get started.”
Each student shoots the exact same bow. All shooting is done instinctively, the bows have no site mount. It’s up to the school to determine how best to implement the program. Some use it as an extra curricular, after school activity. Others use the program as part of the Physical Education curriculum.
The program is also heavily focused on insuring gender neutrality. Each team can have 24 members. The scores of the top 12 shooters on each team are counted toward the team score, although at least four of those shooters must be of the opposite sex. In other words, you can’t count the scores of a dozen boys at least four of those scores have to be from girls and vice versa.
There were 509 students who qualified to shoot in Saturday’s tournament. They qualified for the match out of 1,129 students. The lineup Saturday includes the top six teams in the three divisions. The top 15 male sand top 15 females from each division qualify as individual shooters.
Saturday’s winners will qualify to move on to the National Archery in the Schools Tournament in Louisville, Kentucky in May.