Safety Tips for Beginning Archery Students

Video Transcript

"Now we're going to talk a little bit about safety. Archery is actually a very safe sport although, you know, you have a potentially deadly weapon in your hand, as long as you follow the rules it's a very safe sport. Rule number one is you never take an arrow out of the quiver until you're at the shooting line, and you've got the coach's permission, which is a whistle, to do so. And you never run with the arrows in your quiver. To go to the line we give you one whistle. Now that she's at the shooting line we give her two whistles, she knows she's allowed to load an arrow. Now we give her three. Now she knows she's allowed to shoot. Now you get six arrows, four minutes to shoot them. At the end of that four minutes, another whistle will blow, all arrows back in the quiver, everybody puts their bow down and you walk down to the target to score. Follow me to the target. Once you're at the target it's time to pull your arrows. In a tournament, you'd have the, two archers scoring arrows, one archer calling the points. When they're all down with that then they start pulling. One archer at a time pulls his arrows with the others staying out of the way. This is an arrow-puller, to protect your fingers. Some of these arrows go in real tough, they're really hard to get out. If they're chipped up at all you don't want carbon fiber running through your hands, so you use an arrow-puller. Put it all the way against the target down the shaft as far as you can, put your hand around it, pull it straight out to the side of your body. Never stand behind it and pull. One of these things hits you in the face it's sharper than this end. Once the archer has pulled all of his arrows and loaded them in his quiver, he steps away; the next archer can come in and pull his, that way nobody's standing behind, getting an arrow in the face."