First steps to becoming a better archer

The Golden Gate Junior Olympic Archery Program has a sizable club with beginning and advanced students. The advanced students come on Saturdays for a special 30 minute ‘performance coaching’ session with Level 4 coach David Chan and also must maintain a pre-paid 10-lesson card.

Given the fact that they must be onsite with equipment setup and warmed up by 8:30am, this is a pretty serious commitment!

We issue notebooks to all of our advanced students, but have realized that many of them had not written much in their notebooks. So this week we instituted a new lesson plan. Now students will warm up, get a special lesson from David, and then shoot an 18-arrow test score.

The students then work with a coach to pick one thing in their form to practice for the next 75 minutes. After that practice, they shoot one more 18-arrow test and then put their scores into the student notebook.

For students who have never taken notes, or who have never done a sport where you have to critique your own form, this is the first step of a very important practice. Additionally we are looking forward to gathering long-term data on student archer improvement when overlaid with achievement pin data.

To see how we’re doing this, you can take a look at two of our resources:

• Practice worksheet (3 student worksheets per page) [PDF]
• The practice summary sheet for our notebook [PDF]