I coach compound, so I read junior archery features with one eye on the scores and one eye on the schedule. NFAA ran a piece on Chloe Nelsen, sixteen years old, out of West Bend, Wisconsin. The scores are the easy part. The schedule is what I want to talk about.
She started at seven, after watching the main character in Disney's Brave and deciding she wanted to try it. Her parents took her to a local YMCA for lessons. By 2019 she was dipping into national-level events. Seven to sixteen is nine years, and nine years is a number I believe, but the years aren't the thing I care about. What I care about is that she basically didn't stop inside those years.
Take any group of kids who pick up a bow at seven. The ones who end up with records and the ones who vanish by twelve are usually separated by two words. Don't stop. Not talent, not gear, not which coach they happened to find. That sounds like a small thing to say and it's actually the hard part.
Then 2020 happened. She was set to shoot the NFAA Indoor Nationals and the event got canceled for COVID. Instead of sitting on it, she made it a goal that when tournaments came back she'd "come in swinging." Her training went from one day a week to a few.
I want to point at exactly what she changed, because it's easy to read a line like that as "she trained harder" and move on. She added days. She didn't say she made each session longer. Frequency first. A kid who shoots thirty minutes Tuesday, thirty Thursday, thirty Saturday is building something a kid who grinds one two-hour session a week isn't, because that second kid spends the opening of every session remembering what the last one taught them.
For juniors I still put indoor first, and her record line is an indoor line. Her records run 600 with 120X in Cub Female Freestyle in 2022, 600 with 119X in Youth Female Freestyle in 2025, and 600 with 120X in Young Adult Female Freestyle in 2026, which NFAA calls perfect. Indoor is 60 arrows at a fixed distance with no wind in the picture. When an arrow lands somewhere you didn't send it, the cause is inside you. That's the whole reason to start there. Outdoors, a bad arrow can be a gust and you learn nothing from it. Indoors, the same arrow is your rhythm, your release, your grip, and you can go fix it.
图片来源：NFAA
And here's what a 600 actually measures. Not one clean arrow. Sixty arrows without a collapse. Nobody gets there by aiming harder. That's rhythm and shot execution held together for sixty arrows, and aiming is the last link in the chain, not the first one.
There are gaps in the source, so I'll name them instead of filling them in. NFAA writes that she holds three national target records but doesn't list the years, divisions or scores. The same piece says she swept indoor national records across multiple age divisions at the 2026 NFAA Indoor Nationals in Memphis, without giving the number for each one. I'd rather tell you that than guess at figures to make an article look tidier. Those live in the official results, not in a feature.
Same with Rushmore. At the 2026 Rushmore Rumble, NFAA says just two women in the whole event shot a 900 and she was one of them. Her full score and placement aren't given. Two women in the field is what the source supports, and it's enough to tell you she was shooting at the front of that event.
Then Vegas. She shot Championship Young Adult Compound at the 2026 Vegas Shoot, against young men and young women in the same division, and won it out of a shoot-off against Liam Bartle. NFAA's write-up says no female had won that division before her, and I'll leave that as their claim rather than mine, since I haven't gone back through the event's history myself.
What I'll take from Vegas is how she described the stage. Planet Hollywood, thousands of people watching, and she told herself it was like practice at home. Her words: "it's exactly the same as just shooting at home. Same bow, same equipment, same distance, and same target face."
That's not a poster quote. That's a technical statement, and it's correct. The stage doesn't change the bow, the distance or the face. It changes your heart rate and how much you notice the noise. So the work you do for the stage is the work you do at home, shooting the same shot with the same setup until the shot gets boring.
图片来源：NFAA
She dropped an X in that shoot-off and reset on the next arrow. "I didn't let that rough shot get to my head," she said. Same idea. The arrow's gone. If you can't practice letting go of a bad arrow, you're carrying it into the next one, and that's how a lead disappears.
On volume, she shoots six to seven days a week for a couple of hours a day and has for a long time. Add weight training and equipment work and you're looking at a pro-track load run by a kid in school with a family driving her around the country. Most kids shouldn't copy that. What I tell parents and juniors is smaller. Get in two or three times a week and give each session one purpose. Today it's only the back hand. Today it's draw and hold and nothing gets scored. A short session with one target beats a long session with none, and a long session with none mostly makes wrong movements permanent. Direction before effort, and that one's my call as a coach, not something from the article.
The other loop worth naming is how she uses tournaments. Competition shows you the problem, training solves it. She's got the second half on a calendar, which is why the same mistakes don't follow her from season to season.
She's also got people. Her parents travel with her, her father is her coach and equipment partner, her sister and grandparents show up at events, and her S3DA teammates have been with her the whole way. Michelle, one of her S3DA coaches, got her into competitive archery and helped her get a bow of her own. Billy and the team at Wicked Archery have worked on her setup with her father over the years. Paige Pearce and Jimmy Lutz are the pros she's looked up to. None of that shows up on a score sheet, and all of it is why a nine-year run is even possible for a teenager.
Her goals are on the record. She wants a 900 at Vegas, which she says she came close to this year. She wants to move up to the pro ranks within a few years. She wants to get to Redding, which she hasn't done yet. A sixteen-year-old naming a 900 in Vegas as the next item on the list tells you where she thinks she's standing.
What I'd lift for my own junior program is unglamorous. Don't be scared of a kid starting at seven. Don't be scared of a kid who isn't competing yet. Write down how many times a week they come and what each session is for, and keep indoor as the place they build the base. Nine years isn't a magic number. It's what happens when nobody stops.