Josh is his name ... Archery is his game

By JON KLEINKNECHT

Inquirer Sports Editor

sports@galioninquirer.com

He’s gone from open­ing holes as an offen­sive line­man in high school to shoot­ing holes in tar­gets with arrows.

Josh Hum­ber­son, a 2011 grad­u­ate of Galion High School, is mak­ing a name for him­self in the world of com­pet­i­tive archery.

“I’ve been shoot­ing for hunt­ing pur­poses since I was 9 or 10,” Josh said in a recent tele­phone inter­view. “The spring after the injury, I started shoot­ing in 3D tournaments.”

Ah yes.

The injury.

Josh was a start­ing offen­sive line­man as a junior on the 2009 Tigers foot­ball squad that had a 10–0 reg­u­lar sea­son record, win­ning the North­ern Ohio League cham­pi­onship and being the first Tiger­town grid­iron team to advance to the play­offs in 20 years. He was look­ing for­ward to his senior season.

Some­thing hap­pened between sea­sons, result­ing in bilat­eral frac­tures to the L-3 and L-4 ver­te­brae. As the 2010 cam­paign approached, Josh began expe­ri­enc­ing pain in his back. “I think it was more from lift­ing than foot­ball that caused it,” he said of the injury. “We’re not really sure.”

As a result, Josh was unable to don the Orange-and-Blue uni­form his senior year.

“It really hurt us as a foot­ball team, and I’m sure it hurt him and his fam­ily even more,” Chris Hawkins, head coach of the Tigers said. “Even though he couldn’t play, he was voted a team cap­tain. That shows you the kind of respect his team­mates had for him. He was still a reg­u­lar at the prac­tices and the games. That says a lot about his character.”

Josh has a friend who works at the Sportsman’s Den in Shelby. It was there he became part of a group of archery enthu­si­asts who travel together to shoot competitively.

“From last March to the end of August I was aver­ag­ing one (com­pe­ti­tion) a week,” Josh stated.

In the recently held World Indoor Tour­na­ment at the IX Cen­ter in Cleve­land, scor­ing 430 points out of a pos­si­ble 440, he placed fifth in the Hunter Divi­sion, an ama­teur class. That far­ing qual­i­fied him for the Out­door World Cham­pi­onship to be held this August at Seven Springs, Pennsylvania.

Dur­ing com­pe­ti­tion sea­son, Josh prac­tices shoot­ing five days a week, two to three hours a day. “Right now I’m shoot­ing two to three days a week,” he said.

Prac­tice doesn’t just include shoot­ing. Being able to gauge dis­tance is also inte­gral to suc­cess in the sport.

Josh works on eye­balling dis­tances with the aid of a range finder.

Shoot­ers usu­ally don’t know until they get to a tour­na­ment what dis­tance they’ll be shoot­ing from. Tar­gets can be set up any­where from 10 to 38 yards away from the participants.

Out­door tour­na­ments present a dif­fer­ent chal­lenge as com­peti­tors can be shoot­ing uphill, down­hill or straight ahead.

Asked if he wants to shoot pro­fes­sion­ally, “Josh answered, “That’s some­thing I’d def­i­nitely like to work toward.”

Josh will be trav­el­ling to Alabama to par­tic­i­pate in the Win­ter Nation­als in three weeks.

The spring will bring the National Triple Crown Tour­na­ment. He’ll com­pete in Indi­ana in May, Penn­syl­va­nia in June, and Marengo in July.

Josh spends a lot of time at the Han­dle­bar Ranch in Mount Gilead. There are 3D shoots on Wednes­day, as well as shoot­ing on Sun­day nights.

“That’s a great place to go and prac­tice and get advice,” he stated. “There’s guys there who have a lot of expe­ri­ence and they’re will­ing to help. There’s a lot more shoots and tour­na­ments around here than peo­ple realize.”

Posted by Jon Kleinknecht on Feb 2 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.