Students at Castle Heights Elementary have recently formed their archery team for the school year and have begun practice. Castle Country Radio was excited to get the archery coach, Mr. Kyle Hansen into the studio to talk about this rapidly growing program.

“This is our fourth season at Castle Heights that we’ve competed. Our first year we did pretty well for a competition team, we started out that year we took fourth place in the state. We turned around the next year and we won the State Championship. That continued last year where we won the State Championship again. So we are currently the two-time State Championship defending school and then this year that took off even more where the program is expanding into most of the schools within the district,” said Mr. Hansen. This extra-curricular activity has really grown in just a short amount of time. In fact, this year’s team only had 48 open spots and the tryouts brought out 75 students who were vying for a spot on the team.

“So we started to practice last week, we’re hoping to pull some district stuff together. Our first major competition this year is in February where we’ll go to Salt Lake to defend the State Championship and if we do well there, we will go back to Salt Lake in April for the National,” said Mr. Hansen. Students are looking forward to another exciting year of competition in hopes of bringing home another state title.

Students not only have archery on the brain but they are in the middle of the Annual Elks Hoop Shoot competition. “Right now we are involved in Elks Hoop Shoot contest which will be done on Friday and it involves boys and girls ages eight to nine, ten to 11. We also have done the preliminaries and we’ll do the finals on Friday,” said Mr. Bill Bate. Parents/Guardians of the competitors are invited to come watch the finals on Friday at the school.

The school is also hosting a food drive that has been sponsored by the Student Government. “These young people have organized this food drive all by themselves, they got it set up, its an annual event so we call it the Turkey Trot Food Drive. We will deliver those goods to the food bank this coming Monday,” said Mr. Bate. Any individuals who wish to contribute to the food drive can take their non-perishable items to the school.

To keep up on what is taking place at Castle Heights Elementary visit their Facebook page.