2012 CAHPERD Conference Success
This past weekend, we were exhibitors at our very first convention, the 2012 CAHPERD Conference. CAHPERD, which is the California Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance, brings together physical education teachers from all over California. All of these teaches are passionate about seeing students lead healthy and active lives. Many are also looking for new and innovative ways to engage students in their classes. During the three day conference, attendees could participate in seminars and demos. The exhibition hall was also available which is where we were.
Our mission at a conference is to expose people to Olympic Archery, raise awareness of the opportunities and benefits youth have in the sport, show how coaches can safely and effectively teach Olympic archery, and promote the OAS program. Our vision is to see people realize the value of offering Olympic archery to youth and simply see how cool the sport is. We also want to show people how safe and rewarding the sport is. Along with safety statistics, we want to emphasize the teaching practices that make the sport safe which includes our use of training aids, NTS, range setup, and range commands.
To accomplish this, our first step was to get a booth. Our graphic designer, Tim from our Newberry Center, created the graphics for us. Looks great doesn’t it! We wanted the booth to highlight youth, archery, safety, NTS, fun, and competitions, and I think Tim did a great job accomplishing that. The booth itself was made by Skyline and is an impressive piece of engineering. Can you believe that all of this fits into just these two containers?!?
One of our goals at the conference was to educate people about Olympic Archery. Many people have seen traditional archery from movies, or are bow hunters themselves. However, very few are familiar with the Olympic style. So to give people a glimpse into the sport we laid out a table with archery books, World Cup and Olympic videos, and my recurve bow. The long stabilizer coming out of the bow often caught people’s attention as most were confused as to what it was.
During the conference we also posted trivia questions that people could answer to win a bungee arrow. These questions were a fun way to get people aware of the sport and the opportunities youth have in it, such as competing in the Youth Olympic Games. We started off with some easy questions, but picked out some tricky ones by the end. People attempting to answer this question below, could take a sneak peek at the World Archery Magazine we had open where the article was published.
When we were on break we had the chance to explore the rest of the exhibit hall. There were a lot of neat vendors including Dance Dance Revolution for the classroom, Indo Boards, and Fliker Scooters. Visiting these booths is especially fun at this conference because everyone wants to try it out and be active!
This conference was very successful for us and we want to thank everyone for coming by and seeing us at our booth. It was especially neat to see a bunch of our current OAS coaches! Way to represent Fontana! Your support and encouragement means a lot to us! We were also very encouraged by how positive everyone else’s response was to Olympic Archery. We have quite a few new schools joining the program and we are super excited to have them on board. We look forward to seeing you at next year’s conference and many others!