First off team practice this morning. We've been working our archers pretty hard for the last few weeks so today the coaching staff decided to have some fun, team rounds!

Team rounds are a lot of fun; 3 archers per team, 2 minutes to get off 6 arrows, only 1 archer on the team on the line shooting at any one time, other team members must remain behind the 1 meter wait line until the shooting archer completes their shot and crosses back behind the line. Did I mention it's only 2 minutes for 3 archers to get off 6 arrows?

We were 1 archer short of rounding out the teams so I got voluntold to fill in. Now while I've coached many successful teams to the podium in state championships, I've never shot a team round myself. I'll say this shooting the anchor position sucks. Something goes wrong during the end and you get left with less than 10 seconds to approach the line, nock an arrow, draw back and let it fly.

I'll also say this, I'm amazed that our archers can make this look so easy. I developed a new personal shot process today; stance, nock, set, set up, draw, SHIT! All in all I had a blast shooting this morning, competing in the team rounds is so fast paced, there's not time to think, there's only time to shoot. It also gave me a level of appreciation of what our daughter and the other high performing archers on our team are capable of.

Then it was the road trip down to Tucson and PSE. PSE's factory and pro shop is located in Tucson. We were down there last weekend with our daughter's best friend on the team to help her in trying out new bows.

The staff in the pro shop was phenomenal in helping her out, they went above and beyond. She ended up with an Xpression 3D that they took the 40lb limbs off of a Supra and fitted them to the bow. This is a non-standard, non-catalogued bow for PSE and they really went out of their way to help a young up and coming archer out. They had just requested that we leave the bow with them over the week to go through it, make sure everything was working right with the lighter poundage limbs and have their graphics department change out the Supra limb graphics for Xpression 3D graphics.

So today we went down, set it up, moved all the accessories off her old bow onto the new one and did some basic sight in work. The kid's basically gone from driving a Chevette to a Corvette. I also warned her of the learning process and how this bow is going to be a lot less forgiving than what she's used to; it will make her good shots better but her bad shots worse. Seeing the smile on her face was worth making the roundtrip drive between Phoenix and Tucson 2 weekends in a row. We've only been home an hour and she's already texting our daughter to see if she''s available to go practice tomorrow at the club.

So yeah, it's weekends like this that allow to forget about everything else. It's also incredibly fulfilling to watch a young lady over the course of a year go from archery being just a social outlet and next to impossible to coach to getting down right serious, having a change of attitude, being an absolute joy to coach, competing and finishing on the podium in her first tournament and making plans on competing at the World Archery Festival in Vegas.

What's really scary? She and our daughter will be in the same division in Vegas this year. The two of them on the line at the same time, I'm not sure Vegas is ready for this...

An excellent update!!

Thanks for sharing it with us!

Go Maya... and the newly added young lady, too

Wile shooting the anchor position was stressful it was an incredible rush hearing the timer click down the last 5 seconds, getting the shot off in time and nailing the X!

When the shooter is at the line do they shoot 1 or 2 arrows?

quote:

Originally posted by 5632:
When the shooter is at the line do they shoot 1 or 2 arrows?

1