Hi Everyone,

This is quite a lot of information so bear with us 🙂

First off, congratulations on passing your beginners course with us! We hope you have all enjoyed the course and we hope you’ll stay with us and continue your archery. In due course, I will forward PDF copies of your certificates for your records. You are also now welcome to join our Private Facebook group ‘Compton Archery Club’ (https://www.facebook.com/groups/365906305309723) where we share all sorts of information and you can ask questions etc. Don’t forget our website at https://comptonarchery.wordpress.com/

So with your beginners course finished, what’s next?

As a club we run sessions on Friday evenings (6pm-9:30pm) and alternate Saturdays (10am-2pm). 

October to April is the archery indoor season so these sessions are normally in the Sports Hall where we shoot at 18m which is the standard indoor archery distance. May to September we’re out on the big school field shooting up to 100 yards.

Friday evenings indoors are split between a Junior/Novice Development session from 6-7:15pm and a Senior session from 7:15 until we finish, which is about 9:30pm. Friday evenings during the outdoor season are normally a single session where we’ll shoot until we run out of daylight.

Saturdays are normally split into two sessions and we try to group archers based upon ability so that we can offer appropriate levels of coaching during a session. However, if you wished to shoot in a certain session due to times, that’s not a problem. More detail on shooting sessions can be found on our website.

All sessions cost £3.50 for Seniors and £3 for Juniors. You pay for a 10 session card that we then just tick off as you use them. These do not expire. This tends to work better than other clubs who charge a flat rate per month whether you attend or not, especially for families who might not all come together all of the time.

Sessions are organised via an email that is sent out around 5 days before the session. If you want to join the session, you simply reply to the email and add any comments about preferred times and coaching requirements. We then use our private Facebook group to share the target list as it’s built up.

At Compton we don’t charge anything for additional coaching, we’ll just work with you on any aspect of your archery that you’d like in a way that suits you. All the club running and coaching at Compton is provided by volunteers and all the money from sessions and beginners courses pays for the hall and field hire and upkeep of the equipment. We currently have around 55 regular archers, a complete mix of adults, Juniors, ladies and gents. 

In terms of progression schemes, indoors you can continue to work on the white, black, blue, red and gold arrow awards, plus you can complete the first ‘252’ badge at 20 yards and you can start setting your own PBs for the standard archery indoor ‘Portsmouth’ round that we shoot a lot. Outdoors, the ‘252’ badge scheme is very good for progression and works through distances at 10 yard intervals, plus we shoot a selection of Imperial and Metric rounds which can be used to progress through the archery classifications of ‘Archer’, ‘Bowman’ and ‘Master Bowman’, that were all revamped in 2023. Details of all these can be found on our website.

As with many sports, we get our insurance (and other benefits) via membership of the sports governing body, Archery GB. Adult membership cost is £65 and Under 25/Juniors is £20. This membership allows you to shoot at any Archery GB club including ours which means that you can shoot at competitions elsewhere etc. We realise that, especially for a family, this membership cost is not insignificant so in 2020 we reduced our session costs so that if you attend most sessions through the year, the AGB membership is actually covered. Again, at other clubs this is an additional cost.

Finally, there is getting your own kit. We realise this is an exciting bit 😉 but there is no need to rush this and it can be quite complex. As we don’t need the beginners kit until our next course, we can let you use that for around the next 3 months, whilst you look into your own kit and equally make sure archery is something you want to continue. We have a guide on buying kit and will help you throughout the process, as we realise it can be quite complicated. Second hand from places like Ebay can be a good choice for beginners and again, we can help you with that. Many archers will simply book an appointment at an archery shop like Quicks in Portsmouth, or one of the various Merlin Archery shops, and get fully equipped in one go. Bows have to be sized to archers in terms of length but especially poundage and then arrows have to be matched to the bows, so please don’t rush out and buy without advice. For reference, most of you have been using 25″ risers with 14-16lb pull strength medium limbs which make up a 68″ bow. It’s especially important not to rush to add too much poundage as a beginner as it will just compromise technique. We recommend going no higher than 30lb limbs as a beginner and most will be more like 20-24lb. Just have a chat to us first is the main thing.

Kit Buying Guide can be found here: https://comptonarchery.wordpress.com/beginners-kit-buying-guide-dec-2024/

To process your AGB membership, we just need the following details:

Title
Full Name
Date of Birth
Postcode and address
Contact telephone
Contact Email

(For Juniors, the contact email and telephone can be a parent).

Payment (Adults £65, Under 25s & Juniors £20) should be made to:Compton Archery (c/o Santander)Account Number: 33992383Sort Code: 09-01-29

You will then receive details of your Archery GB membership and how to access the Sports portal web pages etc.

As mentioned above, 10 session cards are then £35 for Seniors and £30 for Juniors (Under 18). Paid to the same account above. So as an example, a new joining adult would pay £65 for AGB membership and £35 for a 10 session card, that gets you started.

Don’t forget that we have a public Facebook page, a private Facebook page (which you are entitled to join) and a website. All of them have a lot of additional information.

If you have any other questions at all, please don’t hesitate to get in touch via our email compton.archery@gmail.com