This Saturday at the Highlands Sports Complex in Wheeling, WV will mark the 4th annual “A Shot in the PARK” Archery Tournament. Some 650 archers for take part in this tournament coming from Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The farthest traveling team will travel from the Charleston, WV area.
It all began in 2019 by then physical education teacher/athletic director Rick Thomas. He started the after-school archery team for all schools in Ohio County. He already taught archery in schools, as most do during physical education class, but then saw the need to expand this and started the after-school archery team.
Back in 2019 “A Shot in the PARK” was help at Wheeling Park High School and they had 25 targets set up and accommodated 550 archers. The next year they expanded to 26 targets and 572 archers. We all know what happened with covid in 2020, but they still managed to get a tournament in, but only had 450 archers that year.
The tournament’s growth made it difficult to be continued at Wheeling Park High School. Hence why it is now at the Highlands on the indoor turf field. This year the tournament will have 60 targets so that 120 archers can shoot at a time.
When speaking with Coach Thomas he stated “The thing about archery is that it brings some many kids from different backgrounds together.” He continued “Some kids that may or may not be the typical sports person that comes to mind can compete and compete quite well in archery.”
Teaching archery myself, as a fellow physical education teacher, I can attest to this. I have seen kids with special needs or some kids that really are not into much other things take to archery like you wouldn’t believe.
Ovatheltics recently traveled to West Muskingum to watch an event and it was here where an archer had a perfect 300 score. Competition can be fierce at these tournaments. These are highly competitive environments. However, when the archers get ready to shot you do not get the loud cheers you think of at other sporting events. A hush comes over the crowd to let the archers concentrate. After the round and the last arrow is shot is when the applause happens.
How archery tournaments work is the archers come in and shot in their flight and then their score is their score. So, an archer can shoot in one tournament at 10:00 am, leave and travel to another tournament, shoot again, and win both.
For “A Shot in the PARK” the first flight “first round of shooting” starts at 10:00 am this Saturday at the Highlands and continues until the last flight at 3:00 pm. At 4:45 awards are handed out.
Another really cool thing about archery is how the score is kept. It is somewhat on the honor system with archers paired with another archer, usually from a different school, and they score each other. They fill out the old school style bubble sheets, scantrons. Those are feed into a machine and the score is automatically posted online. It’s quite efficient. The website and scoring system that will be used Saturday is one that another teacher from Ripley, West Virginia developed “Rlstournamnets.com”. You can also look for score updates from Saturday’s tournament right here on Ovathletics.com.
Awards will be given for both boys and girls. They also give awards for every grade starting in the fourth grade and going all they way up to twelfth grade.
Admission to watch the event is $5 for adults and free for kids. It is worth it if you do not have plans Saturday. The other thing about these such tournaments are that they are the fundraisers for the host teams, in this case the Ohio County School’s Archery Team. Archery can be expensive and most of the burden of bearing these cost falls on the team itself. Tournament targets cost about $125 each, practice targets can cost $225 each, and arrows cost $185 for 5 dozen. The ironic thing is the better your team is, the faster these things wear out.
This sport has seen and continues to see a lot of growth with teams from Hancock and Tyler County sending teams for the first time this year. That’s Coach Thomas’ goal is to just grow the sport and open it up to as many kids as possible. Like we said earlier in the article, archery is something every kid can do. We saw kids in wheelchairs succeed, kids that are superstars in other sports succeed, and kids that do nothing but archery succeed as well. Different backgrounds or demographics in this sport vary greatly, it is very a diverse sport, and a great way for people to come together.
If you would like to help grow this sport by making a donation, or sponsor an event you can email Coach Thomas rickthomas.oca@gmail.com. You can even email if you have archery questions as well.
Look for future coverage of archery events right here on Ovathletics.
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