Archery Preps For Indoor Nationals Under Leadership Of New head Coach

Liberty’s club archery team will be led by a new but familiar face this season.

After the departure of Head Coach Ben Summers, Liberty alum Jason Lynch will step up to coach after being a part of the team from 2014 to 2018.

During his time at Liberty, he won a gold medal at the 2017 US Intercollegiate Championship for the men’s Bowhunter team. He graduated in 2018 but continued as a member of the team, serving as the assistant coach in Fall 2021.

Despite picking up archery in middle school, Lynch never competed in organized competition. Upon finding out Liberty offered archery as a club sport, he decided to give it a shot.

“Back then the team was really small, so it wasn’t hard to get on the roster,” Lynch said. “I came to a competition and loved it.”

Lynch loved archery so much that he has combined his passion for the sport and his degree in mechanical engineering as the head designer at Quality Archery Design (QAD) in Madison Heights, Virginia. His main task is to design arrows rests and other equipment for QAD, an industry leader for archery products.

When it comes to competing, the team participates in two main seasons: fall and winter.

In the fall, the team competes in 3D archery where the targets are foam models of animals placed at varying distances. For the first part of the spring season, the players move indoors to shoot traditional round targets from 20 meters out.

Later in the spring they will move outside, where they will continue to use round targets but at farther distances.

To prepare for any type of competition, they use practice time to replicate what the competition will look like.

“We shoot the same distance,” Lynch said. “We shoot the exact same targets. We shoot with the exact same cadences and timing that we would at a competition, so we try to replicate it as closely as possible.”

Like Lynch, most of the team had little experience in archery competitions prior to college. Graduate student Louis Boyd said he originally got into archery as a hunter. 

“I love to hunt, and when I saw (Liberty) had an archery team, I was like that would be a good way to get away from the books,” Boyd said.

The team will open its season Jan. 30 at one of the world’s largest archery competitions — Lancaster Archery Classic in Manheim, Pennsylvania. The team will compete next at the US Collegiate Archery (USCA) Indoor Nationals in Harrisonburg, Virginia, Feb. 25-27. 

While there is no culminating national championship, the scores from multiple USCA “national” competitions all over the country are combined, which will then determine a national champion.

Aside from wanting to score well at these competitions, many archers join for the social aspect of the sport.

“This program has left a huge impact on me — (it) made my college experience so much richer, so I want to leave something behind so that way, other people can have the same experience,” senior Blakely Logsdon said.

The athletes urged that those interested should try out.

“You can shoot if you don’t have a whole lot of experience and just start learning,” Boyd said. “Sometimes you can pick up the sport and be really good.”

Cosentino is a sports reporter. Follow him on Twitter