Greetings, and welcome to our website. I would like thank you for visiting us, and for taking part in this wonderful sport of stick and string. 
 

 I started shooting a bow and arrow with a Ben Pearson Recuve while in high school in 1972. Joining the archery club with a number of my friends, we soon discovered how much we enjoyed sending those wooden arrows toward the target, Joe Amiano was a teacher then, and he ran the club. And he had one of those new Jennings Compound Bows...was I ever jealous.
 

Then I pulled one back...being used to the stacking pounds of a recurve...my jaw dropped when the weight halved itself...it was a Jennings Model T..one of the first bows to offer 50 percent let off...I had to have one of these!

 

As time passed we discovered the new sport of "shoots" as we called them then, at Blackhawk Bowmen just outside Boonville Indiana. With niches dug into banks, and paper deer pasted to cardboard we felt great if we made it through the course with just a few lost arrows. By then we had graduated to aluminum game getters...he he he.
 

And after the shoot we would all sit around and straighten the arrows that we had bounced off various tree limbs, explaining to all that would listen why we should have shot just ten points better...and get ready for the next shoot. Then it happened. I got a compound...A Bear Polar 2. I thought it had to be better because it had six wheels after all.
 

 And so it went. Through out high school we would gather on the weekends and shoot up bales of hay on our farm, and catch a "shoot" when we could. Then it occured to us...we could go hunting. And we did. Sort of. We bought Tex Isabells Skunk Screen, and some of the new replacable bladed broadheads called Super S, or Savora. And off we went before light on opening day of deer season..I think it was 1975. Did'nt see a deer that year, but the friendships built then continue today.

Finally after hunting every chance I got for several years...I finally took my first whitetail. It was late Oct. in 1982, After years of trying, on a windy warm afternoon I had a button buck come to the oak tree I was perched in. So nervous I missed him the first shot, but it was so windy he never heard the arrow, and calming myself, I made the second shot count. All of these years later, that moment is as fresh as if it were yersterday.
 

And I  developed a love for the sport of archery and bowhunting that still lives. I look forward to that first blast of freezing air each November...with dreams of bucks trailing does....

Today, over thirty years later, I have won state titles, shot in 3D tournaments around the country, hunted all over the US and Canada taking numerous species of animals, and built tens of thousands of archery targets with the company I started at the age of 23. And I enjoy shooting today as much as I did that first day many years ago. It just hurts more now ha ha.

Again thank you for participating in this sport I love so much, encourage others to try it. And enjoy everyday you have afield, because they will pass...in time.

 

 

Ralph Harris
American Whitetail Inc.