Goals for the Winter Season

Lets hope it doesn't take you 7 years!

As we move from outdoors to indoors (Wednesday 4th September), we say goodbye to shooting 122cm faces, long distances, AGB's 252 awards and rain .. And hello to 40 and 60cm faces, 18m and no need to stand in a puddle. Its quite a different environment and experience to the great outdoors so perhaps take a look at our article on indoor shooting if you haven't read it yet. Might give you a heads up on what to expect.

Indoor archery can get a little repetitive. You aren't out in the fresh air. Its shoot collect shoot collect shoot collect pace can get a little monotonous. There's not even the challenge of arrow in the grass hunting to break things up. Winter season, more than ever you need to have a purpose to your shooting and we have one all ready for you - the GA Indoor badge. You can read about the specifics of our badge scheme here .. but lets go over its broad intention. Goals are always good in archery. Gaining awards show you are getting better and best of all you get to brag about your badges! So if a winter of badge chasing and improvement sounds good .. lets get into it.

For those who shot for their 252's over the summer, the chief differences from the 252's is the level of badge you can achieve indoors is based on your average score over 30 arrows on a 40cm face (called a Bray 1) .. and not a required score at a distance. Indoors, the higher the average score, the higher grade the badge. This means if you go tonto and score off the charts, you'll get a higher reward than you probably were expecting. That's a slightly different approach from the more deliberate distance based 252 were its a succeed/fail deal for a set badge at a specific distance. Every round has the potential to be that golden success. There is more good news in that you only need to shoot the required score once to get that badge. You don't need two qualifying scores, as the 252 does, before that sweet sweet dopamine hit .. Score once, cough up the cash and the bling is yours.

In addition, this year, there is something new for indoors. During AGB's long awaited revamp of the handicap and classification system, new official badges were created and we finally got to see them this year. Sole(?) stockists are the ever popular Merlin and they are pretty different from what we've seen in the past.

There are three levels of badge (or more accurately, classification). There is the lowest level, the Indoor Archer (three levels), middle level the Indoor Bowman (three levels) and highest the Indoor Master Bowman (two levels). These classification badges require a bit more commitment to your archery in that you need to shoot quite a few full rounds to be eligible. The lowest three classifications 3rd, 2nd and 1st class Archer require you to shoot 10 dozen arrows in any formal indoor round but these can be at any "event", we assume this includes club night. If so, this is another badge newer archers could work towards and it is a recognized achievement in AGB's eyes. If you attended a competition, you would be ranked at the level you had achieved.

The higher classifications have to be shot at competitive events (Bowman) and record status shoots (Bowman and Master Bowman). While competitive events can still be be quite relaxed such as the Ayrshire league, Record Status are very formal, AGB recognized events. Think the archery equivalent of a board game using all the rules and the expansions! Record Status events can be a little tense as they are usually for formal national rankings, championships or competitions with real prizes (other than chocolate!!!!). Quite the experience.

Still, no need to rush into classifications if you aren't feeling it just yet. The GA indoor badges are more than enough to get on with and can take you all the way from beginner to knocking on the door of the highest level. So take a couple of weeks to get acclimatised to indoors and get those important 18m sight marks then the badge hunt can truly begin!

Pro tip: this is absolutely how you get better as an archer. By chasing badges that get increasingly harder as you get better.

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GA Indoor award badges can be purchased from GA board members.
AGB Classification badges can be purchased from Merlin Archery
Explanations of the Classification tables can be found here. And the Tables themselves can be found here