With spring on the horizon, the archery team geared up for their last competition of the season on Saturday, March 1st. As the archery season winds down, I spoke to the Ms. Barr–the head coach of Archery and Grier’s Dean of Academics–about her team.
“Archery is a really unique sport that not a lot of people get the opportunity to do,” said Barr. Barr started shooting at the young age of seven. “I’ve been shooting archery most of my life,” she said. Living outside of town in a rural area, Barr and her sister didn’t have opportunities to try organized sports, so they turned to the outdoors and archery.
Barr learned how to coach archery through a program called NAS (National Archery in the Schools). Grier’s athletic director, Ms. Cherie, learned about the program and implemented it in our school, and in the words of Barr, “The rest is history.”
As an “intuitive shooter,” Barr says, archery is “all about feel”. The key to her coaching style involves teaching the team about the line of sight and how to adjust to their shot naturally. Barr adjusts her coaching to individually suit what her team and each individual archer needs. Using NAS’s 11-step process, archers learn how to perfect each shot because Barr believes that “consistency is important.” Archery is a sport all about having fun. While still a competition, Barr wants her team to shoot against themselves, not each other.
This season, the team struggled with tournament cancellation due to weather and large competitor teams taking sign-up spots from Grier’s small team. Located in the center of Pennsylvania, it has been difficult for the handful of archers on our team to compete with teams of up to 50 archers. Next year, Barr hopes to get to more tournaments to showcase Grier’s talent.
