disabled beginner

[felixity]

im not entirely sure where this should go!

my friend and i are planning to start archery in may and are both quite excited as you may have guessed by my previous thread.

my friend is a wheelchair user and so the purpose of this thread is to find out if there is anything we need to consider apart from the obvious access issues.
this will also be of help for me as im very able at the moment but i have used a wheelchair in the past and may well need to in the future.

we are both interested to find out if there are differences in the competetive side of the er..sport and wondered if there are any differences eg shooting distances etc...

any pointers of where to find information will be great

[worthipa]

Originally Posted by felixity

any pointers of where to find information will be great

You might try here: GNAS - Disabled Archery for a start?

[clickerati]

Felixity, may I also suggest ArrowheadUK, as they have fantastic wheelchair quivers.

[SVL]

Hope you enjoy your archery course in May.
Many years ago I shot with two wheelchair archers. They both could trash me no problem from FITA18m up to FITA Ladies events (and still can I guess).
Anyway I noticed a few of the modifications they had made to their wheelchairs one was to boost the seat area to make sure they had good back support and also raised the seating level. One also took the side bar off.

Your friend my not have to make any modifications and I am sure your coach wil give good advice.

[Harold's Eye,It wasn't me]

Felixity

Archery is a highly inclusive sport. Issues that are regarded as physical or sensory impairments in other environments are often quite easily accomodated in archery and become irrelevant to the archers ability to shoot at very high levels. Often the only barriers are those that apply to everyone, such as the level of determination and application.

I shot my first ever 500+ Portsmouth (a commonly regarded 'landmark' score) alongside a wheelchair user who also shot his first 500+.

From your post I presume you are about to do a beginners course. I am just about to run such a course with a wheelchair user as one of the students. He came along before the course to discuss anything that he/we needed to incorporate. We found that he could easily manage anything we will cover in the course and he worked out some adjustments he will make to his chair set up (exactly as Clicki and SVL have suggested above).

As is true with everything in archery make sure the prep work is done and everything should be fine.

[felixity]

thanks for your answers

thats kinda what were thinking, we have emailed the club and were gonna figure out the logistics of parking and getting on the field in advance...i think it may take some teamwork but we have managed most things in our time(apart from trying to go on a cross country walk when we were about 10 - the combination of ploughed fields and styles ended that one)

im sure it will be fine, but i thought it was worth asking the question because then we could sort anything that did come up out in advance as you said

[Mark L]

Hi

I am teaching a young lad , who is in a wheel chair , at the moment. The only difficulty that we have come up against is the size of the bow. We originally tried a traditional recurve but it was too long to use and kept fouling on the chair. We have since swapped to a Mathews Genensis which is working perfectly.

Hope you enjoy the training.

[miragezx]

Hi,just finished coaching a lady in a wheelchair on a 6 week beginners course she had no previous experience of archery but really enjoyed the course and finished shooting really well,as mark L stated length of bow is important the lady wanted to shoot recurve not compound but i found a 66" bow gave good clearance.enjoy the course and good shooting.

[Robin the Hood]

Going on your location, you may be worth while contacting Stoke Mandeville near you and asking for a contact address / number for the archery section. Not necessarily to join but to find out some imformation about the do's and don't's about wheelchair shooting you may find useful.....

Paul... P.S Welcome to the madhouse....

[Thunk]

Archery is the only sport I can think of where wheelchair users can compete on equal terms with able-bodied. I know to my cost there is nothing stopping them from shooting extremely well!