West Virginia Wildlife from Eyewitness News

Archery Scoring

25,000 arrows are scored every year at an annual tournament, now help is here.

April 1, 2009
Reporter: Patrick McMurtry
Videographer: Brad Rice

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Hundreds of kids packed the Summersville Armory over the weekend with one goal-win one of these big trophies at the Archery in the Schools state tournament.

With groups like these, scoring is tough and usually the overall winner and the runner up are only separated by one or two points. That's when the folks from Beyond the Backyard stepped up.

Chris Walls/Beyond the Backyard says:
"We funded money to the DNR for a scoring system which streamlined the scoring process. They can bring in more kids to shoot, tallying all those scores by hand can take forever, so we were able to make that donation, they bought the software and you can see this place is full of kids."

By the time the winners get their trophies, these kids will have shot a collected 25 thousand arrows in the competition. Thanks to this computerized scoring system, they'll know who won minutes after the final arrow is shot.

Chris Walls/Beyond the Backyard says:
"Anytime we can partner with any organization which furthers our mission, whether it be with the Archery in the Schools program, the WV DNR, we're absolutely going to do so. Kids learning these skills, the good thing about them shooting in this tournament, they can take these skills and get beyond the backyard and that's the beauty of our partnership."

This is a relatively new group, one that Chris says has already taken off thanks to the participation of a lot of very fired up kids.

Chris Walls/Beyond the Backyard says:
"Beyond the Backyard is an organization that Bobby Warner started in response to a national trend that kids aren't hunting, fishing, being in the outdoors as much as they should be. We send out a quarterly news letter, we have an inter-active web site and we've only been in existence for about six months and we have over 3,000 kids."

Chris says that number will continue to grow as more folks find out more about his group, Beyond the Backyard. For West Virginia Wildlife, I'm Patrick McMurtry, Eyewitness News.