America is really good at archery, and we have the world championships, Olympic medals and a whole lot of filled deer, elk and bear tags to prove it.
Maybe it’s time we started acting like it.
Did you know Team USA walked away from the 2026 World Archery Field Championships in Yankton, S.D., with 17 medals. Seven were gold, nine silver and one bronze. Casey Kaufhold became a double world champion in her first trip to the event, while Brady Ellison won a medal of each color, bringing his career total across various world championship events to 25. I’m not sure how many medals you have to win before we’re allowed to call that an ass kicking, but 17 seems safely above the line.
We don’t only prove it on podiums.
It’s October, which means there are also a whole bunch of deer, elk, antelope and other game animals that were alive Friday and aren’t anymore because American bowhunters are pretty damned good at this, too.
Competition archery and bowhunting aren’t the same thing, but both require practice, patience and the ability to put an arrow where it belongs when it matters. One gives you a medal when you get it right. The other gives you a lot of work and hopefully a full freezer.
If you want to understand how good American archery has been, think about what the U.S. men’s soccer team would have to do over the next 25 years to match it. They’d have to win world championships, earn Olympic medals and keep doing it for generations. If they did, we’d call it one of the greatest runs in American sports. Archery has already done it, and hardly anyone notices.
When the sport returned to the Olympic Games in 1972 after a 52-year absence, Americans Doreen Wilber and John Williams won the women’s and men’s individual gold medals. Four years later, Luann Ryon and 19-year-old Darrell Pace did it again, so apparently American archers didn’t need much of a warmup after the 52-year break.
Pace won another individual gold in 1984, Jay Barrs won individual gold in 1988, and Justin Huish won individual and team gold in 1996. According to USA Archery, Americans have won 18 Olympic archery medals, including eight gold, six silver and four bronze. Brady Ellison added an individual silver in Paris in 2024 and teamed with Casey Kaufhold for bronze in the mixed team event, so this isn’t ancient history we’re digging out of a dusty trophy case.
We should make more noise about that. We know the names of our football, baseball and basketball stars, wear their jerseys and spend Monday mornings explaining what their coaches should have done differently. American archers have been winning at the highest levels for generations, yet most people probably couldn’t name more than one of them. Maybe archery is partly responsible because we’re generally better at shooting bows than bragging about ourselves.
Bowhunters dont have that problem, successful or not.
Then there are the kids, which might be the most important part of this whole thing. More than 1.32 million students participated in the National Archery in the Schools Program during the 2025-26 school year across more than 10,000 schools, with more than 100,000 competing in NASP tournaments. We spend an awful lot of time in the hunting and archery industries worrying about where the next generation is coming from, while more than a million of them are standing ten yards away holding Genesis bows.
Somewhere on those shooting lines could be another Casey Kaufhold, Brady Ellison or Darrell Pace - or Chuck Adams or, wow, Fred Bear. I hope there is, but I also hope there are a bunch of future bowhunters standing there who have no interest in ever standing on an Olympic podium. Put bows in kids’ hands, teach them to shoot safely and well, and give them a chance to figure out the rest without us turning it into a 47-page strategic plan.
Some will fall in love with competition, some will discover 3D archery and some will eventually trade the school gym for a treestand and learn that foam deer are considerably more cooperative than real ones. Others will never compete seriously or hunt anything and will keep shooting simply because shooting a bow is fun. I don’t particularly care which path they choose, because every one of those paths keeps another person connected to archery.
The part we can control is what happens after they discover it. Those kids need tournaments, clubs, 3D courses, archery shops, hunting opportunities, mentors and places where they can keep shooting after the school bow goes back on the rack. NASP has already done the hard part by putting bows into the hands of more than a million kids a year. We ought to be smart enough not to lose them afterward.
America doesn’t need to become an archery country because we already are one. We have Olympic champions, world champions, bowhunters filling tags every fall and more than a million kids coming along behind them. Some will chase gold medals, some will chase whitetails and some will just shoot because they love doing it, and all three sound pretty damned good to me.
Just keep them shooting, and American archery will be just fine.
I don't know what to tell you about mens' soccer.
– Jay Pinsky