High School Archery Club Takes State Championship

by Susan Weikel -- The majority of the students on the Churchill County High School archery team started this year’s season with no experience. Coach Dean Schultz smiled and said, “I knew we had time, and the kids just kept getting better and better and better. It just blew me away.” He said they shot many, many arrows with constructive criticism and praise, and the growth just came. For the state shoot, five archery team member traveled to Las Vegas to shoot and eleven students did a virtual shoot (a shooting course set up exactly as the Las Vegas shoot, but students didn’t have to travel to shoot) in the Fallon high school gym.  The cards were all scored in Las Vegas. The top 12 scores for the team were added up and the state championship went to Fallon. The top five shooters for Fallon were Thomas Openshaw, a freshman, who placed second in the overall high school boys division; Brianna Wagner, a sophomore, placed fifth in the high school girls; Faith Gentry-Steep, a sophomore, placed seventh in high school girls; Cassidy Campbell, a sophomore, placed eight in high school girls; and Natasha Emke, a freshman, placed ninth in high school girls. And now there is talk by some of the shooters’ parents about attending that national tournament this year in Sandy, Utah, an endeavor that Schultz would support. So, we may yet see more news from this archery club. In 2009, the national Archery in the Schools Program came to Nevada and was piloted in Las Vegas. Dean Schultz said he received a card from a gentleman involved with the program and gave him a call. They talked a bit and by the end of the conversation, Dean had decided to take the leap and start the program in northern Nevada. He said they started off very small. “We crawled before we walked.” The Archery Club is not a high school sanctioned sport; it runs as a club. There are two classes of archery offered at the high school and an afterschool club that meets on Tuesday and Thursday from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. and some Sundays. Some of the club members participate in the classes, while some are just in the club. The students all shoot with the same style of bow, a Mathews Genesis, that was designed for this program. All bows can be adjusted from a range of 20-14 lbs.  Schultz said his goal for the students is to see them gain the skills that will allow them to enjoy the sport as a lifelong activity. Whether they do that through competitions or just recreational shooting with their families and friends, it is an activity that they can participate in anywhere. “This is my driving force here. It really is. It’s really enjoyable.” Which is obvious as Dean has taken teams to Las Vegas for the past nine years and brought home the state championship six of those times. “It’s the kids I’m telling you. I push them because I look at the kids there, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure they’re part of something that they don’t forget about from their high school experience.”     Sign up to receive updates and the Friday File email notices. Support local, independent news – contribute to The Fallon Post, your non-profit (501c3) online news source for all things Fallon.