Korean archery in New England

This past weekend Kaya Archery flew me from my home state of Michigan out to Connecticut to help them with a weekend archery get-together that they and Greatree Archery helped put together. One part of it was for JOAD coaches and students (FITA style archery), but the other part was demonstrating and teaching Korean traditional archery. Mr. Kwak Yun-shik, the owner of Kaya, was supposed to do that part, but he fell ill and couldn't travel, so Freddie Won of Kaya called me up and asked if I could help them. Well, I did...
One special thing is that this marked the official founding of a Korean traditional archery club in the United States that is sanctioned by the Korea Archery Association. They are officially called Korea National Archery of New England. Hopefully, it is the first of many clubs across the United States and around the world.

The meet was at the University of New Hampshire (Durham). There were not large crowds of people, but rather about three dozen archers, young and old/FITA and trad, who have a great interest in the activity. On the first day, most of the day had JOAD coaches learning coaching techniques and JOAD archers learning more about FITA archery. The last part of the afternoon was devoted to teaching all who were interested (most everyone) all about Korean traditional archery. That first day, I gave a rather in-depth talk about Korean trad archery, and then had everyone who was interested try their hand at shooting bows. We used special "thumb ring" gloves developed by Kaya/Greatree and they worked well. A few people even hit the 145m distant target. The only negative point about the day was the heat--it was extremely hot.

The second day was a lot cooler and everyone was a bit more laid back. We had two Korean trad sessions. I instituted a mentoring program and kept my remarks to about five minutes (as a refresher). The archers I taught the day before became the teachers to newcomers. It worked fairly well and I was pleased. Many new archers had their first hits, including the teenage daughter of the owner of Greatree Archery (Freddie Won of Kaya gave her a 35# bow in honor of her achievement).

To see some pictures, look at

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set … amp;type=1

If anyone lives in New England and would like to join the new Korean archery association, contact Mark Olson (vidarull@yahoo.com).