It’s a good thing Samantha and Jack Kerr get along. Because a sibling spat between the two teenage archers could involve an apple on someone’s head at 20 paces.
Samantha, 15,was the first to pick up a bow and arrow. Enchanted by the archery derring-do she saw in movies like The Hunger Games and Brave, she saved up her allowance money and bought a toy set at Canadian Tire, taking aim at a thick Styrofoam target her grandmother gave her for Christmas.
Jack, 17, quickly took up his sister’s newfound passion, adding to their roster of shared activities like music lessons and martial arts, and the siblings signed up for an introductory training class in the basement range at Royal City Archers in New Westminster.
Their first session was a bit of a reality check.
“We learned we were doing everything wrong,” Samantha said.
But both were keen to learn how to do archery right and when spaces opened up on the regulation-size range at Royal City, where serious archers hone their eye, Samantha and Jack were all in.
That was almost four years ago, and while many of their other interests have diverged, the two siblings continue to push each other at the archery range. Samantha won a gold and silver medal in at the BC Winter Games in Kamloops last February, and Jack came home with silver and bronze medals.
Samantha, who’s in Grade 10 at Dr. Charles Best secondary school, said “there’s not really a competition between us.”
That’s because they compete in different categories of the sport; Samantha practises bare bow archery that doesn’t use any kind of sighting aids to help line up shots, while Jack competes in the Olympic recurve category in which archers have various attachments affixed to their bows to sight their shots.
Still, Samantha was pretty stoked when her personal best score at the games bettered Jack’s score by one point.
“I was just so happy I got a higher score,” she said.
Jack, a grade 11 student at Centennial secondary, was supportive. “Whenever Sam shoots amazing, I tell her she did great.”
The two also like to measure their progress in the sport in province-wide mail-in competitions in which archers from across the province submit their scores on their home range by mail. Both said they enjoy the individual challenge of getting better as their targets they aim at from 18 metres get smaller — from 80 inches, to 60 inches to 40 inches.
Samantha said their shared passion for archery has helped cement her relationship with her brother.
“We’re definitely closer because we don’t do anything else together anymore.”
Jack said it gives them common ground.
“Sometimes we talk about archery, and sometimes we talk about cats,” he said of their dinnertime conversations.
As for those Hollywood archers that first fired their archery journey, Samantha said immersing herself in the sport has been eye-opening.
“The people in the movies are doing it wrong,” she said. “Now I appreciate when they do it well.”
