My brother Jeff has a good friend and former co-worker, Donnie Williams, another big-rig driver who lives about an hour’s drive from here in Pelion SC, just outside Columbia. As it happens, his 13-year-old daughter Delilah is…wait for it…WAIT FOR IT…
Umm, a national-champeen archer? Rilly?
Yup, seems so. According to the archery app Donnie recommended to me, called the NASP Portal (that would be the National Archery in Schools Program, in case y’all were wondering), Delilah got off to a somewhat sluggish start in the competitive bow-and-arrow field after having been encouraged to take up the Sport Of Kings by one of her coaches at school. After the merest handful of shaky outings, though, D quickly settled down to rise through the ranks to the very top of the youth-archery heap, and has stayed there ever since. In her first big tournament, she scored only 176 out of a possible 300 points, which sounded respectable enough to my unenlightened ass until Donnie assured me that it was no great shakes. Nowadays, Delilah’s numbers are consistently in the 270s, 280s, even 290s.
I’m told by both the young lady’s dad and my brother, who has met her a time or two his own self, that Delilah, while extremely intelligent and a solid. straight-A student, is also extremely shy—an unfortunate but fairly common combination of personality traits my Madeleine also had to deal with earlier in her childhood. Thankfully, as time went by and she got older she outgrew the shyness but held onto the smarts, as I’m sure Delilah will in her turn.
As for the brand, type, and string weight of the bow she uses in competition, NASP allows only Genesis compound bows strung at 20 pounds in their events, nothing else is acceptable.
From the NASP Portal app’s About page:
And here’s a snapshot of Ms D’s recent tournament performance:
Jeff informed me earlier today that the Williams clan is presently on their way to—what, either Virginia or West (by God) Virginia one—so’s young Delilah can dominate another tournament.
I fooled around with the bow and arrow as a wee sprat myself, although I wasn’t anywhere near in Delilah’s league. The deal was my late, much lamented Uncle Gene took up the bow and arrow to go hunting with, going so far as to set up a large, soft target surrounded by stacked-up hay bales in his long, narrow backyard, thereby creating a practice range where he might hone his archery skills. Unca Gene was kind enough to let any of us neighborhood kids who were big and strong enough to string his fancy recurve bow unaided use his range also, a pastime I greatly enjoyed. He insisted on being out there with us on these occasions as a semi-chaperone, the Adult Supervision who’d make sure we behaved responsibly, that we wouldn’t lose our heads, go feral, and start shooting arrows at each other.
Delilah would probably laugh at me for this, but I remember my first day of bow-n-arrowing: I wrecked my left forearm something fierce when I jumped in shooting without any kind of arm guard whatsoever—a rookie blunder which allowed the tough, rough bowstring to rake down the inside of my unprotected left forearm from elbow to wrist, leaving it skint-raw, swollen, badly bruised, even a bit bloody after I’d loosed only a few arrows in the general direction of that huge bullseye.
Note that I said I had fired my pointy, colorfully befeathered sticks “in the general direction of,” not “into” or “through” said target. All in all, even though we all had a lot of fun, that first experience as a bowman was not an entirely happy one for li’l old moi. Next time out, I vowed that I’d be bringing forearm protection of some sort or other along, even if the best I could manage was to wind an old t-shirt around my arm and knot up the sleeves to tie it down.
When Jeff told me about Donny’s kid and her unusual athletic career, I casually remarked that her story would make an excellent topic for a CF post. Right away, Donny got seriously stoked about the idea, fairly well dancing around on his toes like a guy, his back teeth afloat, urgently in need of a good, long whizz nownownowNOW with nary a Men’s Room in sight. Nor a tree; a deserted alley; the unlit doorway of a vacant building; a patch of unmanicured, overgrown shrubbery; or an abandoned car to provide concealment while he takes care of business.
So here we all are, then. Sometime soon, I think a short interview with Delilah to discuss her thoughts, her feelings, her ambitions, her likes and dislikes in regard to her sport of choice might be in order.
Last but not least, along with the other stuff Donnie sent me a pic of his favorite shirt:
Heh. ‘Nuff said, my friend. Not that any of those things are necessary, of course; from where I sit, it’s altogether clear that Delilah is perfectly capable of looking out for herself. If anybody warrants worrying about, it definitely ain’t this girl, it’s the hapless subnormal who decides it’d be a grand idea to mess with her. Aforementioned subnormal will wind up flat on his back and immobilized in a hospital bed, scratching his cracked, aching noggin in bewilderment as to how he came to be there in the first place.
- Entries
Down here in my town there is an archery range where competitors use long bows to shoot at multiple targets while riding horseback around a 1/4 mile circular course. The annual international competition is held(where else?)in Mongolia.
Really, ‘7? Didn’t know about any of that stuff, pretty dang cool. Some smart Mongolian ought to see about getting the HU involved, assuming they haven’t already done so.
I went to the western nationals in Utah. Dem younguns are pretty badass, wished I coulda made it to Louisville also.
Man, no fair! How come it, dadgum it, that you guys have all heard of this youth-archery stuff, enough so that you’ve even attended some tourneys, while I’ve been completely in the dark about it all this time?
Don’t feel bad, I love archery but had no idea there was youth competition. Like you Mike, I had an uncle that was a extraordinary archer. He bear hunted with the bow taking quite a few over the years. At one point he stopped carrying a handgun as backup, preferring to give the bears a sporting chance. This is true.