Interest can best be aroused and maintained by organizing a club from the zealous members of the archery class, if such a class is already in existence either as a part of the required physical education program or as an intramural or extra-mural activity.
It is not necessary to start with a large group of members. In fact, it is preferable to organize the club around a few deeply interested members at first, until the management of the club is firmly established. Officers of the club should be elected to preside at meetings, to take charge of arranging tournaments and regular archery activities, to take care of equipment, publicity, and membership, and to repair old and construct new equipment.
Besides the customary officers, as president, secretary, treasurer, some clubs find it quite expedient to add the following officers to their club:
Activity Manager.–Whose duty is to look after club activities, tournaments, and matches, both regular and novel.
Recorder.–Whose duty is to enter the scores of all tournaments and matches in permanent files, and on regular schedule blanks. There are many tournaments which require constant recording of scores, particularly the daily accumulative or round-robin tournament, to determine weekly and monthly high-score men, and to give other members a numerical rating.
Equipment Manager. – Whose duty is to check and care for the equipment. This checking the equipment can be used as a club project. Many people find it extremely interesting as well as economical to learn to do their own repairing as well as making new equipment. This manager may need assistants to help him in this work because the manual side of archery is fairly slow work, and usually many people are interested in making their own tackle.
Club activities could be promoted very efficiently with fewer officers than the ones listed above, but with responsibility delegated to many, more members may be actively engaged in the affairs of the club.
One of the best ways of stimulating interest is to offer weekly or monthly prizes. This would include winners of novelty and handicap matches as well as regular tournament matches. In this way the dub or beginner may be encouraged to continue active participation. The main difficulty in this is raising the money to provide for prizes. This would usually have to be done by membership dues or assessments.