Archery is a fantastic sport for setting and achieving goals – there are so many different schemes and awards you can chase. These range from achievable during your first steps into the sport, to goals that may take years of practice.
The Norton Dozen
The Norton Dozen is your first step into achievement after your beginners’ course. A 12-item checklist, achieving 10 of these items earns you a snazzy Norton Dozen badge! It’s aimed at encouraging people to start exploring what archery can offer, from trying different bowstyles to scoring a round to asking for coaching. To find out more, speak to our New Members’ Representative.
ArcheryGB Progress Awards
ArcheryGB offers a fantastic set of 5 awards designed to push archers to trying new distances or focusing on scores. There are two different sets of badges/scores, indoors and outdoors, and they come in 5 colours – from white to gold. Indoors are all based around the Portsmouth round, whereas Outdoors will encourage you to shoot a bit further for the harder badges. They all involve scoring 36 arrows and seeing how well you do!
Portsmouth badges (indoors)
The Portsmouth is the typical round most of our club archers will shoot indoors (though there are plenty of others you can try!), and these badges are all based around how well you do. It’s 60 arrows, shot at a distance of 20 yards, scored using metric scoring (10-9-8-…). They start from 300 and go all the way up to 590. There may even be a 600 badge, for a perfect round…
252 scheme (outdoors)
The 252 scheme involves shooting 3 dozen arrows (after 6 sighters) on a 122cm face at distance of 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 80 or 100 yards, with different coloured badges available for scoring 252 or more (for recurve bows) at each distance. You have to do it twice, though, so we know you’re not just having a lucky day! Scores for compound, longbow and barebow differ – download the scorecard to see what you need to score for your bowstyle, for a copy of the full rules for the scheme… and also so that you can print it out and score your 252 round at a club session, of course!
ArcheryGB Classifications
Classifications are an ArcheryGB scheme that you can use to see how far you’ve come in your archery journey. Classifications have scoring benchmarks for dozens of rounds, with different scores for gender, age and bowstyle. There’s also both indoor and outdoor classifications! The further into the classification table you get, the more prestigious the event you have to shoot the scores at – with the highest tier, Master Bowman and above, only being eligible to shoot for at large tournaments! More information can be found on the ArcheryGB website (indoors and outdoors), or please reach out to our Records Officer.