Bows, bows and more bows - catering for beginners courses

pipeski

Member
We have another beginner's course coming up. This year, we've seen a notable shift in our beginner demographics - we used to get about 90% adults. Our last course was 50% juniors. This next one looks like being about 75% juniors - ranging from 9 to 16.

And that brings me to bows. With adults, you can pretty much keep a supply of 66" and 68" bows, and limbs ranging from 16lb to 24lb (ours are mostly 18lb). With kids, it seems to be a different story - recommended bow lengths and weights vary a lot more.

So a question to those of you who run courses for groups of juniors - what bows do you use? So far we've only bought the standard wooden-handled take-down recurves that typically cost about ?90 with all the bits. We need bows with sights on them, in order to teach the sort of course that AGB would have us deliver, so that tends to rule out a lot of the cheaper options, which are generally only barebow. I know you can rig a sight of sorts for a 'jelly bow' using the old-fashioned trick of a pin and a bit of draught excluder tape. But surely there's got to be something better than that in 2015?

I'd be interested in hearing the experience of other coaches...
 
hi Pipeski. Our club has found ourselves in the same situation with beginners courses. Earlier this year we purchased several 48" and 58" Core Pulse wooden take down bows from Merlin. They take a Cartel midie sight and cost about ?40.00, both are suitable for childen 8 plus years, limbs start at 12# upwards.
 

pipeski

Member
hi Pipeski. Our club has found ourselves in the same situation with beginners courses. Earlier this year we purchased several 48" and 58" Core Pulse wooden take down bows from Merlin. They take a Cartel midie sight and cost about ?40.00, both are suitable for childen 8 plus years, limbs start at 12# upwards.
Yes, those are the ones we've used. They're about ?55, and then with a sight, a cheap bag, a stand and a few arrows you're soon up to ?90.

There seem to be plenty of cheaper bows (e.g. one-piece fibreglass bows). If I could fine one that would take a sight, we'd be sorted...
 

Qechua

New member
When it comes to teaching Scouts/Guides (the only time I'll teach young people), it depends on size and ability, but you can roughly gauge it on age. If it's 6-8 year olds, then we just use jelly bows. 8-13, we'll be using wooden takedowns, I think ours are 54'' (haven't checked in a while), and poundage is 16-24. Personally, I feel for that age that anything over 20 pounds is too heavy, but I wasn't about when the kit was purchased, and I've raised my concerns on it. 13+ and I'll be looking at full size bows, weight of 16-24 pounds. Again, I feel starting weight should be under 20 pounds, but then again, I don't like starting anyone (irrespective of age) over 20 pounds (I've found bad habits creep in very quickly) Notably, we only teach barebow, although the sessions we run are more like have a go sessions than a full beginners course.

Just out of curiosity, where does the guidance of only teaching sighted come from, because my manual certainly includes barebow, and I had to teach barebow on my assessment.
 

pipeski

Member
No, we don't teach sighted (freestyle) only. We teach a mixture of barebow and sighted aiming, as per the Level 1 coaching material. Most of our emphasis is on sighted aiming though, as that style of recurve archery tends to be the default for new archers joining our club.

We're moving towards only teaching barebow as an option on the final week for those who want to try it; we find that if we teach barebow on the first week, beginners get the side-of-face anchor position fixed in their minds, and have a really hard time finding their chins for a freestyle anchor for the rest of the course. Discussion with other coaches confirms that this is a widespread thing.

We don't even give adults 20lb bows to start with. I've seen a man as big as a double decker bus struggle to draw an 18lb bow. Some people just don't have a lot of natural strength in the right places. For an 8 year old, we don't go above 10-12lb.

But anyway, I think those are probably matters for another thread!
 

johnnybeta

Member
Ironman
we recently got a couple of these for juniors on our beginners courses: Beginner Bow | Easton Archery and they've proved quite popular - the fact that they're ambidextrous is a bonus. The sight pin isn't great but is a step-up from the pin-and-foam-tape approach (I also think we chose to replace the strings that came with them).
 

pipeski

Member
Thanks johnnybeta. I've ordered one of those to see what it's like.

I see that they claim a draw weight that varies from 10 to 20lb depending on draw length. How well does that work?
 

pipeski

Member
Well, the Easton ambidextrous beginner bows went down well! We bought three, and they worked perfectly for the smaller kids. My own son, who is 9, tall for his age, and quite strong, has decided he prefers the usual wooden-handled takedown bows, because he gets better results. But we'll continue to use the Easton bows for younger beginners, I think.

One defect on the bows is that the sight is a little bobble of plastic on the end of a (plastic) screw. The kids invariably drop the bows at some point (or lay them down on the floor) and the sight bobbles get snapped off. An email exchange with Easton support staff led nowhere - apparently replacements for this flimsy part aren't available, so I'll have to cobble together something myself. The bows are also a bit of a pain to store, as they're designed to be left assembled (no way to remove the limbs without an allen key). I'll be de-stringing them between courses, but that still leaves us with three bows too long to fit any standard bow bag.

Thanks for the ideas, everyone.
 
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