Adara A. – A NASP® archery tournament is really fun but takes a lot of volunteers to run it. Recently, I volunteered for my school’s archery tournament. I learned a lot of interesting facts about the scorecards, and how a tournament is ran. I volunteered for the Breast Cancer Awareness Pink Shoot Tournament in Missouri. My job was to change the target faces between every flight.
A benefit of helping is getting to know other volunteers. After changing target faces, I cheered on all the archers as they entered the range and saw if any other volunteers needed snacks.
I liked my job. My team tried to see how fast we could change about 20 target faces and tried to beat our record each time.A fun “bow”-nus is you never knew when the flight was done because every flight is different. We would run down to the gym thinking we were late when we were actually early. This added a fun mystery element to the day.
One of the cool parts about volunteering is I learned a bunch of cool tips about scorecards that you might not have known before. For instance, if your scorecard is bent or folded it won’t go into the scoring machine. The machine will kick the scorecard out, and the volunteers will have to tally it up themselves. If you are scoring, for instance, a 7 but you accidentally score a 4 and you x out the 4 and put a seven, the scoring machine will kick your scorecard back. The scorer must choose the lower number instead of the one you really shot.
If a mistake is made when filing out your scorecard during the round, always raise your hand for a line judge and they can erase your scoring mistake.
The most time-consuming thing that I helped with, is the takedown. We had our tournament in the gyms of our junior high and high school. Right after the last flight we rushed everything over to the junior high gym. In a short amount of time we put the quivers up, pulled up the tape, rounded up the targets, and took the curtains down. After everything was put up in the first gym, we had to rush down to the high school gym to set everything up for the awards ceremony. We went all out with a bunch of Breast Cancer Awareness pink decorations. After awards, we took down that gym. My favorite part about takedown was we had a lot of balloons everywhere and we got to pop them.
It was a team effort.
In a tournament that big, you need plenty of volunteers. At this tournament there were over one hundred volunteers for over one thousand archers. You need set up crews, line judges, people to run the concession stands, people to tally up the scores on the scorecards, tear down crews, and many more jobs. It is very important to volunteer. In my opinion, it was very fun as well. It feels good to help out the kids when they shoot archery. Best of all, there are no “draw-backs” to volunteering.
-Adara A. is a 2022 student contributor. Watch for her future submissions.-
