Bearden athletes in a number of sports have signed scholarship papers this year, and many of them have been well-publicized.
Archery, on the other hand, flew under the radar.
But two Bearden archers have been right on target.
Archery is a sport that requires a great deal of discipline. Those who shoot have to have an extreme amount of focus and grit to be able to succeed, and that sums up the accomplishments of Bearden seniors Hadley Spreng and Hailey Murphy who are both set to shoot at the University of Montevallo.
To some, like senior Hadley Spreng, it comes naturally.
“I started shooting in sixth grade,” Spreng said. “I had just quit dancing the year before, and my parents told me that I needed to find some sort of sport to do or they were going to sign me up to play softball in a recreational league with some friends of mine.
“At the time, I had just read The Hunger Games, and I was watching the show Arrow with my grandmother so when I found my little brother’s toy bow in our garage, I started going out into the backyard and shooting at trees.”
And just like that, she fell in love with the sport, which started the vision to shoot in college.
“The majority of colleges don’t have archery programs, and even fewer have actual school sponsored teams instead of clubs, so the recruiting process looks a little bit different for us than it does for other sports,” she said. “Very few coaches are at tournaments actively scouting people, and if they are, they’re looking at everyone on the field.
“For me at least, I did the majority of the reaching out to coaches.”
Murphy was able to take advantage of an event in Georgia to help in the recruiting process.
“The college recruiting process for me was actually very simple and easy since I had the opportunity to go to a college exposure event in Georgia last summer,” she said. “A bunch of colleges came, set up booths, and the archers were able to shoot and then go talk to coaches and ask about their programs.
“That’s when I narrowed my choices down to 3 schools, based on distance, academics, tuition, and their archery programs.”
Archery has a close circle of athletes despite the fact that they are scattered across the nation.
“The archery community is really tight-knit because you see the same people at pretty much every tournament, so I had a ton of friends with contacts which made it a lot easier to reach out,” Spreng said. “I was talking primarily to the coaches from Columbia University and Texas A&M because they are two of the bigger schools that have competitive programs, but I was also talking to the coaches from Carson Newman and Lindsey Wilson College.”
Collegiate teams aren’t always located all in the same place, like football or basketball teams would be.
“I love my team now, but it’s not like other sports where you practice together and see each other all the time,” Spreng said. “My coach lives in Tampa and our team is spread out across the whole southeast.”
Murphy and Spreng are both looking forward to continuing their archery careers in college.
“Archery at the collegiate level is very similar to what I do now – traveling to tournaments and competing,” Murphy said. “The only difference is there are specific tournaments just for collegiate archers, such as collegiate nationals, regional tournaments and even international tournaments.
“I don’t know how big the tournaments will be since I’ve never attended them, but for reference, the tournaments I’ve shot in the past, there have been up to around 120 people in my division alone.”
Even with the continued tournaments and practicing, there are still many differences between high school and collegiate level archery.
“Another difference in college is that I will be competing in another archery discipline known as 3D,” Murphy said. “This year I moved up divisions and will shoot 70 meters for outdoor, which is the Olympic distance (about 75 yards) and indoor, at 18 meters (about 20 yards).”
“3D is a bunch of different distances all randomized and shooting at foam animals in the woods instead of a field or in a facility.”