“Lift your chin.”
I did, just a little, before releasing the string.
It made a difference, enough that I smiled and quickly nocked another arrow. It was my last class at Central Coast Archery, and I was hooked.
After my final arrow, I asked instructor Keira Brooks how to keep archery in my life. We walked off the range and chatted in the adjacent shop. Now that the four-week beginning archery class was over, she said, my best bet was to rent a bow and arrows for an hour at a time. Do that a couple of times and see if I still wanted to make archery mine.
That was in September 2024. In late October, I got my own beautiful maple wood Galaxy Sage recurve bow, half a dozen arrows, and a quiver—and I’ve been returning to the range regularly ever since.
“We love new archers,” said Brooks, a second-year Cuesta College student who’s been working at Central Coast Archery since 2020. “I love it when people come into my classes, especially in the adult class … and they’re like, ‘We have no idea; we’ve never done it before.’
“It’s my favorite to be the one to give them the experience because I loved it when I got to do that, and I hope other people like it too.”
As a newbie, the draw of archery is still fresh and grows every time I shoot. It’s mysterious on some levels—why in middle age am I now pursuing this hobby? Yet it makes sense: It’s physically and mentally challenging. It’s rewarding. It’s easy to get into.
And it’s not just me. On the indoor range in San Luis Obispo, it’s natural to chat with fellow archers. When the range is “hot,” we line up, focus on our stance before nocking, aiming, drawing, releasing, following through. Depending on where the arrows hit, we groan or cheer a little, compliment each other’s good shots, and do it again until we’re out of arrows.
One of us then calls, “range is clear,” and as we retrieve our arrows from the targets 17 yards away, we inevitably strike up a conversation. We’re smiling, even as we’re thinking about what went right or wrong. “Just one more round, just one more.” We look at the clock as we return to the line, hoping our hour isn’t up.
“Addicted.” “Hooked.” “Passionate,” we say, trying to articulate our enthusiasm.
For the past decade, Central Coast Archery has been drawing archers to its indoor range and pro shop, tucked in a small shopping center between the Toyota and Honda dealerships on Los Osos Valley Road. Its owners—Scott Wilson and his son Joel—and their employees greet whoever walks in with a smile, calling most by their first name.
“We love to connect with people,” Scott said. “A lot of our customers feel like family.”
Men, women. Young, old. Hunters, recreational shooters. Seasoned competitors and beginners alike all find not only a sense of accomplishment but community here.
“We have grandparents that bring in their grandkids to come and shoot and they both shoot. There’s college kids, there’s the hunter. We can get them all in the same hour,” Joel said with a laugh. “Even our marketing stuff—I’m always trying to figure out who’s our customer.
“It’s kind of everybody.”
‘We have to do it all’
This hub for Central Coast archers celebrated its 10th anniversary in October. About two decades before that, Scott had established and run the archery section of his family’s EC Loomis and Sons feed store in Arroyo Grande—after a customer introduced him to archery around 1990. “I was hooked immediately, after just a couple arrows.”
He continued selling bows, arrows, and gear when Farm Supply bought the feed store.
“We brought archery from our store to Farm Supply. We had a lot of customers—it was really starting to go at that point,” Scott said. “Both Joel and I worked for them, and at one point, we just decided to do our own thing.”
With input from the family, they opted for this spot near the dealerships, with more visibility than the cheaper-rent industrial areas where many archery ranges end up, Scott explained.
“We felt like we’d take a chance and spend more and have a better location, and it’s really paid off,” he said.
The shop’s aesthetic is lighter and more inviting than one might expect of a niche sporting goods pro shop, and that’s by design. Joel explained that they wanted big windows in the wall they installed between the range and the store, and both spaces are illuminated by bright lights and floor-to-ceiling exterior windows facing the parking lot.
“We wanted it to be like a coffee-shop feel almost—cool art, inviting, somewhere people would want to hang out,” he said.
They also recognized that the shop couldn’t be just a hunting store.
“It had to be more than that. The community is very outdoor based—a lot of young families, soccer moms, that kind of thing,” he said. “Even budget-wise we couldn’t just last on hunting gear; we have to do it all.”
By “all,” Joel and Scott mean not just the retail side—including colorful kid-size bows, classic-looking recurves, compounds that look like Batman tech—but their workbenches for repairs, a regular rotation of classes and outdoor events, and their expertise.
“I can see that it would be kind of intimidating for most people to come here and do this,” Scott said. “I just want them to know that we never just hand somebody a bow and say, ‘Figure it out.'”
They’ll equip new archers with a bow and arrows and basic instructions and pointers.
“We make sure they’re going to have a good time in there. We want you to have a good experience here,” he said, “and with the sport.”
More fun
On a Thursday in early January, Atascadero resident Christie Carroll came into the shop for a minor repair and chatted easily as Scott worked on her compound bow.
“These guys are definitely awesome and helpful. And what a cool and unique addition to SLO,” she said.
“Your energy’s always good,” she told Scott, “anytime we come in here.”
Carroll’s been shooting her bow for the past year after a friend introduced her to archery several years ago. She and her husband already knew they liked target sports.
“We like to shoot guns, and you can’t really do that everywhere,” Carroll said.
With a few acres of property in North SLO County, they realized archery would be a fun sport to do at home.
“The problem with that, though, is that I’ll lose arrows and I’ll have to go hiking to find them,” she said.
Then she bought her husband a bow for his birthday so they could shoot together, “because then it’s always more fun.”
When she and her husband shoot together, they tend to be more competitive with themselves.
“I don’t know if we’re really competitive with each other necessarily, but maybe a little—if my shot’s better, I’m definitely going to point it out,” she said with a laugh.
When asked what sport archery is most similar to, she thought for just a second.
“Aside from something that’s obvious like shooting guns or something like that that requires a target and a good eye, I think maybe disc golf,” Carroll said.
“Golf in general,” Scott chimed in.
“Absolutely.”
“Archery’s way more fun,” Scott said.
On an early December day in the shop, Joel compared archery to surfing: “It’s this core group that’s very into their thing, and they’re willing to get up early and go out late. The hunting side of it feels like that. It’s its own niche thing.”
Joel and Scott hunt regularly and both have competed in the past. Joel said that since parenthood, his time’s more limited—though his 2-year-old has already picked up his first bow.
“I kind of have to pick and choose what I do. I like hunting, bringing back meat for my family, the adventure of it, the accomplishment of it,” he said, noting that he practices regularly, even without a hunt planned. “Even if I am competing, it’s always for hunting, that’s always the end goal.”
Joel said bowhunting stands alone, especially with the effort it takes to get as close as 40 yards to make the shot.
“You have to place an arrow at the right spot at the right time. It feels impossible a lot of the time,” he said.
“It’s not something to be taken lightly—you’re taking a life to feed your family, so you want to be as perfect as you can be as far as technique and how you execute the shot,” he added, likening making that shot to the shock of a car wreck. “You’re trying to think back on it, there’s so much adrenaline and so much intense emotion going on that you almost kind of shut down a little bit.”
Process over outcome
When it comes to competitive archery, the sport shares some similarities with gymnastics—there’s a routine and the athletes are aiming for the highest score—and while archers also compete individually, some of the bigger archery tournaments hold team events, said Bella Otter.
The Cal Poly senior and Atascadero native got her first bow for Christmas when she was 12 and has been at Central Coast Archery, as a student and now a coach, ever since. She started competing at 13 and won her first national championship in 2020.
The intensity of competition has taught her to “take refuge” in her process with each shot.
“It’s about really being able to know what to tell myself, knowing what to think about, knowing what to visualize,” she said.
Otter noted that many pros compare the mental game of archery to that of tennis and golf.
“A huge part for me is the unending emphasis on process over outcome,” she said. “I can only control giving myself the best opportunity to win, and that only comes from executing my process well.”
Both Otter and fellow Central Coast Archery employee Chris Garcia said that tournaments bring together people who compete to win but also uplift each other.
“You’re standing next to all your competitors. You’re seeing all the guys you’re trying to beat right next to you,” Garcia said. “And at the end, whoever won, you’ve still got a smile on your face even if you lost the match.”
The welcome he received at his first tournaments made him want to return again and again.
“You realize this is more of a community—we’re all competing, but it’s more of a community coming together to help everybody enjoy the sport,” he said.
Getting into archery more than a decade ago drove Garcia to push himself out of his comfort zone, beyond the difficulty of honing his focus and process when shooting on his own.
“You add a tournament pressure situation and then things go numb. You don’t feel your body the way you normally would when you’re just practicing,” Garcia said. “You might have to scream at yourself in your head to get you to go to that next step to finish that shot correctly just so you can score as well as you know you can.
“Now I’m diagnosing myself the same way I would diagnose my shooting—what do I do, how do I react to being under that pressure?” he said. “Then trying to figure out how to calm your heart rate, how to deal with your muscles tensing because of all the adrenaline … and trying to get that out so you can make a shot.”
For Otter, the hunger to improve—and earn a red, white, and blue jersey—motivated her to compete at higher levels.
“I kept seeing these people at those tournaments with USA jerseys on, and I was like how do you get that?” she said. “Especially because they were compound shooters like myself, and compound archery isn’t in the Olympics … but they have USA jerseys, so what’s the deal?”
She was around 18 when she first competed in the national circuit that would secure her a spot on the United States Archery Team and the coveted jersey. In 2022, Otter began competing professionally and earned the No. 2 ranking in the under-21 category. She’s since stepped into the professional women’s category and last year was ranked No. 10. Her goal this year: to get into the top eight.
Otter’s spot on the team led her to compete alongside and against some of the women she’d looked up to for years. In 2022, she was invited to be one of four women representing the U.S. in Paris for stage 3 of the World Cup—basically the Olympic-level tournament for compound shooters. After Paris, she was among the four women invited to compete in Colombia for stage 4 of the World Cup. In her second elimination match, she faced Sara Lopez—”one of the most dominant women in compound archery in the world,” she said.
Lopez was the first pro Otter had ever heard of, back when she was in the Junior Olympic Archery Development program at Central Coast Archery. “So to hear her name at 13 and be like, … ‘You can be a pro? I want to be a pro,'” she said. “And to actually be competing against her in her home country, a head-to-head match, was such a surreal experience.
“She, being the world champion that she is, she won,” Otter said with a laugh. “But I felt like in my own heart of hearts, this is such a win.”
In 2022, the first year Garcia competed barebow—a recurve without added sights and stabilizers, which also isn’t in the Olympics—he went to tournaments that contribute to national rankings, “just to find out where I was in the nation score-wise.”
He did well at several tournaments and won the outdoor USA Archery national target shoot, which put him on the team and got him invited to the Pan American games in South America. But because barebow tournaments are self-funded, he said, “I had already spent all my money and effort to go to those tournaments … otherwise I would have gone.”
With this year’s indoor tournament season just beginning, both Garcia and Otter headed to the Lancaster Archery Classic in Pennsylvania, Jan. 23 to 26—the largest indoor tournament on the East Coast.
Pretty much everybody
Standing in the bright indoor lanes at Central Coast Archery, it’s hard not to feel something primal as I hold my bow. I remember to lift my chin and not let my shoulders cave in. The past hour of shooting has tired me out, but I draw one more arrow.
“It’s such an ancient sport. There’s something really satisfying about loading an arrow—even just on a recurve bow, just a simple stick and a string—and drawing it back and launching that arrow and figuring out how to make that hit what you’re aiming at,” Scott said. “I don’t know how to explain that.”
And with younger aspiring archers, many no doubt want to be the next Hawkeye or Merida or Katniss.
“My favorite is when I’ve had some kids come in to shoot and they just know shows like that or movies like that and they’ll try to replicate how they shoot in movies—and sometimes how they shoot in movies is not what I would teach,” said Central Coast Archery instructor Brooks. “I have to kind of dial that back and get creative.
“But it’s very cute when they come in with that sort of role model—when they have that attitude, they’re always the more enthusiastic kids, which is really sweet.”
No matter the archer’s age, the sport is accessible, Otter said. “I’m teaching kids from 7 years old to 70-year-old adults. … I love making it work for pretty much everybody.”
And each archer has a different reason for returning to the range.
“Some people, it’s just like a therapy almost. They can come in and shoot arrows and they have to focus on that so they don’t think about the rest of their life,” Joel said. “Some people like the technical side of it—there are so many steps involved to make it perfect, and they want to nail every single one of them and they’re not going to stop until they do.
“Everybody that comes in the door is here to have fun.”
Garcia said that most people who jump in are hooked from the first few arrows. “You can see it on their face. They always smile or they’re excited to grab that next arrow to shoot again.”
And who knows where it could lead.
“The process itself is really meditative, and there’s the sublime feeling of executing a perfect shot and that instant reward of actually seeing it hit the target where you would like. In that sense, I would say that it’s addicting,” Otter said. “But I would say that more than any of that, what keeps me coming back to it and keeps me as engaged as I am is all the people that I’ve met, and all the community I’ve been able to find in it.
“That ultimately for me is … the foundation of it all. Obviously that started at Central Coast Archery.”
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 9, 2025.