2020, WHAT WILL YOU BRING?

First ever archery competition target; first ever 1st place. (PSAA Indoor Nationals)

Now I'm sure you're thinking, what does this have to do with 2020? Well as cliche as this might sound, this is my first ever archery target. Yep this is the target that started all targets. This is the target that launched me into the world I know today and honestly it makes me shiver to think how one decision has impacted my life.

I didn't want to shoot archery competitively. I didn't think I was good enough, but my coach at the time pushed me and my parents pleaded me to compete and I went in, shot the best I possibly could, and I won! Look at that target! For the pressures of a competition on a young 13 year old who only had one year of practicing 10 yards and then just getting into 20 yards at the largest competition she knew about, that is truly incredible.

A couple years past and I had become the aggregate champion for this string of PSAA competitions two years running. Then I joined another club. I joined this club because it was, JOAD or Junior Olympic Archery Development program and I told my dad that they had to be good to have "Olympic" in the name. I was right. It was a very good club, and that club was: Palmyra JOAD. There I gained a world class coach, who still helps me today, and I met some archers who were in the sport to win the sport, but God was not done there. Yea, I had been invited to invitationals and I thought that's as good as it could get, but then someone suggested that I should go to Lancaster Archery Supply.

There I saw more archery equipment than I had ever seen in my entire life. We heard about the lessons at the shop and how good they were and so my dad had signed up for lessons for me with a coach named Heather. Never would I ever had thought in my life that I would be learning from a coach who in the future would be an Olympic level archery coach. Actually, she happened to be my second Olympic coach. The first I found out later on in my archery career was that coach I was talking to you about from Palmyra. Anyway, I got a couple lessons and my scores sky rocketed. Soon a couple people were watching me and I was invited onto the Lancaster Archery JOAD team. I had no idea that when I accepted that offer that I was the only one who had been invited onto the team, everyone else had to go through the Academy program. When I realized that, I was completely honored. I never knew, though how far this team would take me.

I traveled all over the country, down south as far as Alabama and Florida to as west as Nevada... Vegas to be exact. I started meeting the professionals, I practiced with some of the world's best shooters, I was learning from some of the world's best coaches. I even debated trying to get specific coaching to get onto the USA Junior Dream Team, but I realized that though LAS JOAD was not the JDT, the team members who I was shooting with were some of the best in the world and that was good enough for me. Then I started shooting with the pros, I began befriending the pros, and suddenly my dreams were becoming true.

Though it all seemed as it would fade away once my senior year hit and this was because there were no schools that offered archery or the ones that I was interested only offered it as a club. My mom and I had gone to a USA Outdoor Nationals in Decatur, AL. I believe we were talking around and my mom started talking to a coach and he recommended that I look at the University of the Cumberlands. Still to this day I have no idea why he told us to look at UC, but he did. I wasn't interested at first, but then I looked at the website, then I looked at the team, then I found myself contacting the coach, and then I found myself accepted to the college, and I was signing onto the archery team. Best decision ever. Never would I have thought in the first two years of shooting on this team that I would have received two championship rings and some national titles and I'm sure more to come!

Archery has been so much. I shoot traditional recreationally, I used to compete in the compound division, and now I am competing in the bowhunter division. I now shoot for a college team that is one of the best in the nation, I got a part time job as a videographer for an archery company, and archery even brought me to my wonderful boyfriend. Now in bowhunter I feel like I am shooting the best ever.

Archery has launched me into the best life I have ever dreamed of. I remember as a little kid shooting at that first PSAA Indoor Nationals competition. I remember looking around at all of the people in the venue, thinking "This is the biggest competition ever!"---which of course I would learn later on that it was no where near the largest--- and I looked up to the top guys on our team thinking, "if only I could be just like them." I had no idea at that moment how far I would actually go in archery. Then years later, after all of my running around and shooting across the nation, that I went back to PSAA Indoor Nationals and shot for my first archery club. I began shooting and no, it wasn't my best scores that I was putting up, but I turned around one end and saw all of the little kids watching me. Then I had realized there and then that I had accomplished my very first goal. Suddenly I was the archer that all of the kids looked up to. I was the one that they thought, "I want to be like her!"

This was all because of one decision. One competition.

What my point is, is that at any point this year you could make a life altering decision. Not to scare you, this shouldn't be anything that scares you. For instance, this....

This is the first group of targets that I have shot in 2020. A perfect score on this target is a 300. Now the target on the left is a 294. Now you would think, "oh that's a good score!" and for shooting bowhunter, that's actually a great score, but I have always wanted to shoot a perfect score with my bowhunter set up. Now in shooting this left target, I felt that I could shoot better, though my highest score has been a 295. I always knew that I could reach a 300, but in archery every point matters and sometimes, especially in the 295-300 score region, it takes every ounce of practice to make that five point difference. I decided to shoot another round. I felt that I could do better and I thought to myself, if I shoot another 294 or 295, then I am just shooting my average and that's great, but if I shoot better, then that would make my confidence even better! Well, then the second target happened... a 299! Now of course, that isn't a 300 like I wanted. It was all in the last arrow. The last arrow I dropped my only point, because I had realized I was one arrow away from accomplishing my goal.

Now sure, I didn't accomplish my goal yet, but I thought that I had gone into a rut only shooting 294s and 295s with the occasional 293. If I hadn't decided to shoot that second round, I would have never shot the 299. Then I would have never realized how close I actually was to achieving my goal. I would have still thought that I was stuck in my rut.

That was the second day of the new year and the new decade. What else will 2020 bring?

So make good decisions. Think about what you are doing, but make sure you can be relaxed about what you are doing. In the archery world, that's the true difference between the 295 and the 299 and then really that one arrow that separates the 299 from the 300. So be relaxed, be calm, and I can't wait to see what 2020 has in store and where the new decade will take us!

I just wanted to end on this little silly note. We have a chicken and she is almost a year old now and I thought to myself, "wow she hasn't even lived a year yet and she has already experienced two different decades!"