Our indoor tournament schedule has become quite busy! In the next few weeks we will shoot at our State Championship and our National Championship. It’s exciting and all of us are looking forward to seeing archers succeed, stumble, learn and compete!
As parents and coaches, we are excited to see growth and independence. Neither of those things happens without challenges and effort.
Let’s back up a bit and differentiate between skill acquisition and competition. They are two very different but related things. We continually gain skill through instruction, self discovery and the practice needed to attain competence. The more practice we employ means instruction is able to be assimilated and the process of self discovery is enabled. We gain skill incrementally by the work we put forth. There is no magic, only effort and diligence.
In competition we take our skills and stress test them. Competition also has a skill set unique to itself. Managing ourselves, our wants, our expectations and maybe the expectations of others, are things we need to compartmentalize. None of those things is relevant to the execution of the shot, but all of them often impact execution. The stresses of competition manifest themselves many different ways and every archer is unique in how they handle those stresses. We have all seen competitors in many sports practice beautifully but perform poorly under the spotlight. Competition skills are the art of managing oneself to allow skill acquisition to shine through.
Ok, ok, what is it that we should do as parents and coaches? Let our charges perform! Tournament time is not time for instruction. Instruction on the line only serves to confuse. If a coach sees something that an archer is doing that is not what they usually do, they will mention it and try to refocus that archer on the job at hand. That job is to execute the archery shot the way each archer does it during class and independent practice; nothing more, nothing less. Each archer should be focused down range. Mom, Dad, Coach, does not have the answer in the moment. When an archer is distracted on the line, they are not focusing on what needs to happen next. Shot evaluation is done immediately after the shot, by the shooter. Only the shooter actually knows how they executed the shot and only the shooter understands if any particular shot was an anomaly or something else. There is the shot. The evaluation of the shot. The preparation for the next shot.
We hope all of our shooters have an opportunity to have fun, learn and own their sport. Creating as much space as possible for archers to ‘do their thing’ is hard for coaches and parents, but essential to growth, learning and success. Let’s all HAVE SOME FUN!
