Student goes to archery nationals
One fourth-grader at Cooper Elementary Schools is on her way to nationals. Briley Wooldridge will be competing at Louisville, Ky., in May. Her sport is archery.
The archery program at Cooper is about five years old, Coach Ashlee Lunsford said. Only a few schools in the Bentonville District offer archery. Cooper is also unique as the only PE4Life elementary school in the district. PE4Life emphasizes activities that can be enjoyed by all ages, including archery. Since PE4Life schools offer a PE period every day, Cooper kids have more time to try new activities than other students.
Every spring several grade levels have a unit in archery, but only the fourth-graders compete, Lunsford said. They usually attend a regional tournament and, this year, the team qualified to go to state in Hot Springs. The team didn’t qualify to go on to nationals, but Briley, shooting against both fourth- and fifth-graders, did. She came in seventh in the state for elementary school girls.
Because the team is so big, Lunsford had to decide which students to bring to a tournament. There were 23 students in the running for 16 spots. Her choices were not just based on scores. She also factored in behavior and attendance.
Briley was one of the 16 on the team.
“She lit up the yellow,” Lunsford said. The yellow is the smallest circle around the bull’s eye. “She’s very consistent.”
“I know that one bad arrow might change my whole score, so I have to be careful to stay consistent each time I shoot,” Briley explained in an email.
She likes to visualize the target with the arrows surrounding the bullseye each time she shoots, she said.
Archery has been challenging, the email said, but it’s also fun.
“I enjoy it because it is always different every time.”
She likes being on the school team, but archery is also an individual sport. She’ll be traveling to the national competition with her parents and will be the team’s only representative.
Next year Briley will move to Old High Middle School in Bentonville, which also happens to have an archery team. In fact, the middle school coaches already know Briley since the two schools traveled to Hot Springs for the regional meet on the same school bus.
If she was headed to a school that didn’t have an archery team, she could still compete, Lunsford said. Students can compete individually if a coach is willing to register them, and Lunsford said she would be willing to help her young student.
"I enjoy it because it is always different every time" Briley Wooldridge