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OK, you’ve enjoyed the beginners course and are wanting to take up the sport. Currently you are looking at about £100 to join the club. Plus any additional shooting fees they may have to levy.

Now you need something to shoot. Any archer, any club and even a number of archery shops will tell you the 2 same things. First, never buy anything until after the beginners course (you might not need it). Second, rent / hire your first bow.

This is good for the club, as they get some more revenue off you by hiring out the equipment with a deposit. It’s good for the archer because they get to learn on basic equipment that they will outgrow, usually before the rental charges outweigh the cost of the bow. With a rental bow, as technique, ability and strength improve, the limb weight (bow strength) can be increased simply by swapping limbs for stronger ones. The basic wooden takedown type bows are about £60, so you can expect the deposit to be about £70 to cover the arrows, sight, string, tab and arm guard that should be included in the offer. You want a bag for all that? Any right sized sports bag will do, even a supermarket “bag for life”. Monthly rentals will vary in cost. 

So, there you are, £100 just to belong, £70 deposit on a bow plus monthly rental charges. £200+ for the first year and you still own nothing.

It’s not that I want to put anyone off, it’s just that in any sport where you need equipment to play with, like cricket, tennis, badminton, golf etc. there is always an initial outlay. Sometimes this outlay can be very expensive at the beginning. Unfortunately, this puts a lot of people off, especially in archery. The clubs do their best to lighten the load by hiring basic kit. If you really want a cheap pass-time, take up walking. But then that could become hiking, and that’s a world of expense as well…

I like archery, it’s good fun and provides excercise for both mind and body. Don’t get me wrong.

It’s the end of the last beginners session, balloons have been popped, maybe sweeties earned and that sort of thing. You may have already had the membership sales pitch, sometimes it’s part of the course, because there are things you need to know. You may fit into one of four categories:

You have tried and found that you just can’t get the basics, you know it’s not for you and decide to concentrate on things you can do. But it was fun trying.

Yo’ve done the course, mastered the basics but to be honest, you don’t know what the fuss is about, it just doesn’t rock your world. But it was fun while it lasted.

Beginners courses allow someone, for a fee, to try archery with competent instruction in a structured manner and to decide if they like it or not. Some don’t like it, some don’t complete the course, no problem, it’s a free world and it’s their money. Clubs would prefer to have you on the course than not especially as they’ve taken your money, but hey ho.

You’ve done the course, loved it, popped the balloons at the end and like the idea of taking it up, but you are not so completely sure, life is busy, money is tight.

You’ve done the course, loved every minute, popped a few baloons, spent hours on the internet looking at archery web pages, even read the beginners course manual. You would sell your grannie for another hour shooting arrows and have your chequebook and pen ready.

If you are the latter, well you’re hooked and grannie is being taught how to fletch arrows and other useful archery stuff by her new owners. You still only have perhaps a 50% chance of lasting more than a year before giving up. If you are still shooting after 18 months, then you are in for life. Don’t forget to buy grandma back.

If you are hovering, then it’s likely the bottom line will send you away from the sport. Archery is as expensive as you want it to be, but it is never cheap. To begin with, you need to pay the club joining fee. This should include any affilliation fees to County and Regional organisations, e.g Warwickshire and West Midlands. The fee is likely to include at least the outdoor shooting. Some clubs just need to charge extra for the indoor season, some have a shooting charge of a few pounds each session. The fee will be different for each club depending on their outgoings.

On top of that, if the club is affliliated to the Grand National Archery Society (Archery UK) then you need to pay your affilliation fees to shoot, that’s £35 for an adult. That’s where the insurance and being able to compete in official tournaments come from. There are other organisations out there for different archery styles.

So you are looking at possibly £100 a year just to belong. And you aint got no kit yet.

Day of Defeat (DoD) is a Mod (game modification) for the Half Life game engine. People have been writing their own maps for game engines to run on since Doom. A Mod actually changes the way the game plays. A better way of describing a Mod is that it is a new game written using the existing infrastructure of a game.

Counterstrike is a famous Mod of Half Life (HL), it uses the game engine to produce a game that plays very differently to the original. A less well known but well loved Mod is DoD, which uses the game engine with new graphics to have a team based game based in World War II, Allies verses Axis.

I recall downloading an early version and thinking it was rubbish. This changed with the latest version running on HL1 engine, which was very bright and fun. The current Source (HL2) version is different but the same and enjoys a large but slowly declining following. The British Allies vanished with the Source version, so is only American vs German troops on a huge number of third party maps. It is mainly a capture the flag game, but with variations on the theme with the need to destroy objectives (one way capture) and even the “Orange maps” which do away with the fancy scenery for a minimalist approach. Even then, you can have an Orange capture the flag, or a “Gun Game” where individual players on both sides begin with the same weapon, but advance through the weapons with each “kill”  and the round ends when a player has used all the weapons.

Online clans and communities have prolonged the lifetime of DoD, although there seems to be much less interest in competetive leagues of DoD than there once was. Worth a look.