Claire Seidler’s bow hangs down from her fingers as an arrow shoots through the air. It sticks with a satisfying thwack, piercing through a ring just adjacent to the center of the target.

“One of the pet peeves of pretty much every archer ever is when people say that archery is easy because it’s like ‘Oh, you just click the arrow in, you pull it back and you shoot,’” Seidler quips while setting her bow for the next shot. “That’s not true. That’s not true at all.”

Seidler, a junior, has been practicing archery recreationally for the past two years.

“I tried it at camp one summer and it was really fun, so I started taking lessons,” Seidler said.

She began lessons in archery learning to shoot a recurve bow, the type of bow typically used in competition.

To shoot recurve, an archer must hook the string with their ring, middle, and index fingers and pull back along the jaw to prepare for a shot.

After a year and a half of recurve, she began practicing with the mechanically-based compound bow.

The set up for the compound bow is similar to the recurve except that the weight decreases after the string has been pulled back far enough.

“For an example, a compound can be 32 pounds up until you pull it back far enough and then it drops down to 12 pounds beyond that point so you can hold it for longer,” Seidler said.

The only type of bow Seidler has not practiced with yet is the traditional bow, used historically for hunting.

Though archery was developed primitively around 10,000 BCE as a form of survival, it is presently rated as one of the safest sports worldwide.

“When you shoot, you always have to wear an arm guard and finger tabs to keep the string from hitting you,” Seidler said, adding that compound users don’t need finger tabs because of a mechanical release present in the paraphernalia of the bow.

“Finger tabs go on your shooting hand, which for most people is the right hand, and they go over your middle, index, and ring finger.They keep the string from cutting into your finger,,” Seidler said

All of these protective measures are taken because of the complexity of shooting a bow.

“A typical shot takes five seconds,” Seidler said. “At one second you’re holding the bow downward, at two seconds you’re holding it up, at three seconds you’re pulling it back, at four seconds your feet are anchored, and at five seconds you’re releasing.”

However, the intricacies of archery move beyond the timing of a five second shot.

“When you release, you don’t let go really, you just kinda keep pulling the string back and let it slip out on its own because if you force the release, it jostles you and it throws off your shot,” Seidler said.

The complexity is one of the most intensive aspects of archery for Seidler.

“You have to push on the bow, you have to pull back, you have to make sure that you’re not gripping, you have to make sure that your sight is lined up, you have to make sure that you’re perfectly still, you have to make sure your stance is okay, you have to make sure your body is in the right position,” Seidler said.

Tilting her head back with a wry smile, Seidler remarks, “There’s just so much that goes into it.”