'Hunger Games' fever makes archery cool for kids

By LEANNE ITALIE
Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — In schools and backyards, for their birthdays and out with their dads, kids are gaga for archery four weeks into the box office run of "The Hunger Games" and less than 100 days before the London Olympics.

"All of a sudden sales of bows have, like, tripled," said Paul Haines, a salesman at the Ramsey Outdoor store in Paramus, N.J.

A manager there made a sign for the hunting department: "Quality bows for serious archers and girls who saw the movie," he said.

Archery ranges around the country have enjoyed a steady uptick among kids of both sexes since the movie began cleaning up at the box office March 23, though heroine Katniss — a deadly shot with an arrow — seems to resonate more with girls.

"Katniss is so inspiring," said Gabby Lee, who asked for archery lessons for her 12th birthday in February after reading the wildly popular book trilogy by Suzanne Collins.

"I'm not very sportsy," she offers, but now she belongs to a youth archery league near her Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., home. "It feels really good because I'm usually the girl who sits and reads."

While some young archers have been doing it for years, motivated by generations of hunters in their families, the parents of others love it for its focus, independence and because they, too, have kids not drawn to more typical team or contact sports.

At 7, Christa Mattessich is too young for the gruesome dystopian world that thrusts 16-year-old Katniss and her fellow child tributes into the arena for a battle to the death, a battle Katniss wins thanks to the archery skills she honed while hunting game in the woods of her native District 12.

But Christa loves archery just as much and has been shooting for about two years at the same range as Gabby, Targeteers Archery in Saddle Brook, N.J., said dad Anthony Mattessich in Oakland.

"I'm an avid bow hunter," he said. "At her age, with other sports, they're just running with each other and chasing a ball, then the ice cream truck comes and that's that. For archery, they're a little bit more dedicated."

Abbey Fitzpatrick in Sandy Creek, N.Y., turned 11 on April 10. She also asked for and received her own bow and arrows for her birthday. "It's black. It really looks like Katniss's bow," Abbey said. "She was so brave and very heroic in the games."

Like more than 2 million kids in nearly every state and several other countries, Abbey did archery in gym class this year as part of the decade-old National Archery in the Schools Program that trains teachers in the sport and offers discounts on equipment.

"There's a lot of buzz among young people about archery right now. They want to shoot bows and arrows so badly they're willing to follow the rules," said Roy Grimes, the organization's president.

In Hartland, Mich., enthusiast Robert Jellison teaches seventh-grade science and has incorporated archery through NASP into his lessons on kinetic and potential energy, eye-hand coordination and the properties of pulleys and levers.

Jellison was invited in March with some of his students to perform a demonstration at the local library as part of a "Hunger Games" reading.

"Some of the kids there went out that day and signed up for archery," he said. "A lot of people look at archery as, `Oh, you know, is it a real sport?' All of a sudden there's all this excitement."

Bobbi Bowles owns archery shop K.C.'s Outdoors with her husband in Spicewood, Texas, outside Austin. Sales of equipment have doubled in e Katniss bump is alive and well. "We've had a lot of parents saying, `Hey, little Johnny has seen this movie, what do I have to do to get him into archery?"'

The Johnsons are looking ahead to summer, hoping the profile will be higher for Olympic archery this time around and anticipating the Pixar-produced "Brave." The fantasy in 3-D computer animation features another young, headstrong archer, Merida, who brings chaos to her kingdom in Scotland.

"We had such a good boost after `Hunger Games,'" Richard Johnson said. "The same thing could happen."

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