Within Allen High School there are many extracurricular activities that a student can participate in. The archery club is among those options, and could be a good choice for those who want to do something before or after school.

Kyle Juntunen, one of the teachers sponsoring the club said he enjoys being a part of the archery club program.

“It is a competitive archery team, just like you know, there’s Olympic archery teams, for the US and stuff like that,” Juntunen said. “The goal is to give kids another outlet. You know, we’ve got a ton of sports and a ton of things, but at Allen archery is very unique.”

Students are able to go to the club and practice archery, and when they are ready, compete at a competitive level with their peers. 

This competition can help bring students together in order to win and possibly earn some scholarship money for college. 

“My favorite part of the club is just the types of students that it brings all together,” Juntunen said. “So you get students from all over, you get students who are into archery because they like being outdoorsy and hunting and stuff like that, and you’ve got kids who are into archery because they like video games and games where they shoot bows.”

These local competitive tournaments are a part of the path to competing at the state level.

“We do competitions around Texas, there are local tournaments that are held, some of them are scholarship tournaments where the kids can earn scholarships, but basically, they will do about four or five tournaments, that all lead up to our state tournaments,” Juntunen said.

These competitions can be difficult, and students have to practice often in order to be able to win. 

In the school week there are two days that the club meets in order to practice — sometimes by doing practice tournaments.

“We practice two times a week in high school, and two times a week in middle school,” Juntunen said.“We do practices to get ready for the tournaments, and then we do shoot some tournaments that are basically practice tournaments.” 

Junior archery team member Kylie Aftomis often competes in these tournaments and has continually scored high. 

Points are determined by how close one gets to the center of the target — the closer one is, the more points you get with a maximum of 300.

“One tournament, I shot like a 272, and my friend’s mom, who was a previous coach, actually looked at me and said ‘you shot a 272?’” Aftomis said. 

There are many challenges when getting to this level of competition as you have to practice often and correct your mistakes in order to learn and get better.

“Physically, I wouldn’t say there’s challenges other than you [messing up],” junior archery member Phoenix Bollinger said. “Not knowing how to fix it, and just learning what the form is and how to shoot and get all tense. Mentally, [it’s] a lot of just making sure you’re only focusing on yourself and having that tunnel vision, and not freaking out in between shots.”

The club meets at the Lowery Freshman Center on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and is open        

to anyone who wants to join.

“You can literally just come to practice there,” Aftomis said. “For high schoolers it’s every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 7:30. Everyone is welcome. We have bows you can use, left handed and right handed, just walk in and [be] like ‘Hey, I want to join,’ and someone will help you.”