Let’s start with the basics; what is the Active Target System?
Active Target Systems is a rotating target system that can use multiple target/backstops. It can have two, three, four or more target backstops on it and can rotate them 360 degrees and stop at any position we program it to and do so at any speed we program it to. It is controlled by two ways; the first is the pedal controls that has four pedal operations, and the second is by the application.
BREAK…The Breakable Target Game is our main target and game of play. It consists of four target faces with three breakable target holders on it. It is a 24 arrow and 24 point game with two rounds of 12 arrows or 12 possible points. Round one has a shoot time of 30 seconds at each of the four target faces. Round two can be played in Speed Round Mode with 20 seconds shoot time with the flip of a switch on the pedal control or the press of an icon on the application
There is a colored light bar just below the target face that helps you through the game.
When you select the green icon/pedal, the timed game starts with a solid amber 8 second warning light, then a green solid light means it’s time to shoot. A number of seconds before the shoot time is up, a flashing amber light appears, warning you the shoot time is about to end. When the shoot time is up, a solid red light turns on as the green light turns off and a flashing amber light appears representing the target is now rotating to the next target face. As the next target face gets into position, the flashing amber light stops, and the solid green shoot light turns on while the solid red light turns off. This is your visual guide to the timed game in both normal speed and in the speed round mode.
When “Manual Rotate” mode is selected, the timed game is off, and you are able to rotate the target to any target face you want, one target at a time, and the only light that is on is the flashing amber light when it is rotating. This mode allows you to use a stop watch and shoot as fast as you can to race against the clock to improve your total time to shoot all targets and compete in time with your friends. This function will also be used in our pressure shooting coaching games we plan to develop to better coach shooting under pressure.
Because of the 360 rotating base and endless timing we can adjust, it can be played with our BREAK Target Game or any other target you want, creating an entire new game of play to include target faces everyone is already use to, like a Vegas three-spot or paper animal targets.
With the application, we are currently in development of many different games and coaching modes the archer will be able to choose from.
In addition, we are currently developing an automatic scoring system that will see if you have made a BREAK of the breakable target, or if you shot a miss, and it will automatically reflect your score on the scoreboard immediately. With this technology, we are developing a shooter profile system that when playing, the shooter logs in and his profile photo along with his stats pop up on the screen and will automatically keep track of the shooter’s progress and log it to the shooter’s profile.
Because of its ability to use multiple target/backstops, the system allows for ranges that have limited lanes to increase the amount of archers it can hold and run larger leagues like a Vegas 300 round. You can put an A-line and B-line of four targets on Target/Backstop Number 1 and a C-line and D-line on Target/Backstop Number 3. This will double the amount of archers you can have in a similar space as it takes for just over 1 target. This decreases the amount of target hall space needed or lane space to run larger leagues or tournaments.
Where do you envision this being used?
Our main focus, at first, will be to get these units into archery pro-shops to help increase traffic through their stores. Pro-shops all over the world are going out of business at a truly alarming rate, and something needs to change before it’s too late! We hope to have a program in play that will allow shops to get at least one of these units in their shop and then we will send consumers through their doors to play the BREAK league that will be linked up on the internet where everyone can compete against each other, or the shop will have a chance to just run their own league with their customer base.
Eventually, we would like to see a new national/international archery organization rise from this with a professional archery league as well as an amateur archery league.
Why a new organization?
Because this is a totally different game and platform, designed to be a gateway into archery to get new people excited about archery and then go onto other archery sports.
The BREAK game is action-packed and fast-paced with none of the inherited problems with most scoring targets. Did the arrow hit the line, break the line or score the higher point? Many times this takes calling a judge to make the call, slowing the game down. This also makes it very hard for a spectator to watch and follow along—even harder if they are watching it from TV.
Our Active Target System and the BREAK game makes it super easy for archers, spectators in the stands, or viewers from home to easily follow along with the game as we have visual and audio effects happening all at the same time. This is the type of system and game that will help us attract new archers to the sport and also attract big outside industry sponsors like insurance companies, truck companies, drink companies, and more, which is what is needed to make archery a truly professional sport.
Basically with the creation of this system, guided and supported the right way, we will be able to attract outside sponsors, attract new archers, push more traffic through archery shops doors, increase profits to organizations that already exist that produce big tournaments and do it all while making archery fun to play and fun to watch.
How did this innovation come to you?
After a truly lifetime of development, I can finally share with the world my game changing creation!
It all started when I was seven at my grandfather Fred Hall’s fishing shows which are HUGE fishing tackle, boat and everything that encompasses the outdoor experience, convention shows. There was a rep that sold Ranger Bass boats and Bear Archery bows at our Long Beach show that set up a bunch of hay bales and had people shooting the line of Bear bows. I would run around the entire convention center visiting with the thousands of different exhibitors. I often found myself spending many hours a day at the archery range. Shooting the paper targets was fun but what I got real joy out of was shooting soda cans and balloons.... I was hooked. That year, at the end of the show, as the rep was closing down the booth, he gave me my first bow and said it has to be yours since you had so much fun and was so good at it. This launched my life long love for archery!
My parents, being the awesome parents they are, decided to help me in my new passion, and my father got a bow, so he could shoot with me on our ranch. Those were amazing times I will never forget! Speed up a few years, and soon my mother and older sister became archers as well. Shortly, we became a family of archers, traveling all over California shooting archery tournaments and enjoying the sport to its fullest! I remember as a boy, I would take my bow and portable target with me to my dad’s work, which was on movie, music video and commercial sets all over the country, and I shot my bow on the side at filming locations. I did this from elementary, to middle school and eventually high school. Archery was now a huge part of my life; I even had a bow and arrow put on the side of my high school class ring.
By high school, I was so involved in archery , I was teaching others how to shoot in the thousands at my family’s fishing shows, about 1,500 to 3,000 new archers in a weeks time at each of the three show locations: Long Beach Convention Center, then onto the Del Mar Fairgrounds and then the Ventura Fairgrounds. There I experienced the same thing I found, all the new archers liked shooting paper targets, but they really loved shooting balloons, cans, clay pigeons, and anything else that would show an immediate positive shot reaction. I made the local news many mornings at the shows by shooting different objects on TV, helping advertise the shows and archery.
Fast forward to my junior year in high school and the time had come to open up an archery shop of our own, so we opened Moose Mountain Archery Center. We started with a little work shop in our dining room; I fletched countless arrows for people, set up their bows, and taught archery in our backyard archery range. Shortly after this, we bought a 32 foot toy hauler where I built a bunch of displays that could roll out with PSE, Martin and Bear Bows on and had a bunch of displays for all other accessories. We took this mobile shop to every one of our family’s fishing shows.
Archery has now become such a big deal for us that we decided it was time to move all of our studio equipment out of our 3,000 square foot shop and turn it into our first indoor range with the mobile shop parked just outside the door. Here is where we taught countless people how to shoot archery and were even running leagues. Yeah.... shooting paper was fun, and our collection of 3D animals was great as well, but not enough still. This is when a family friend that once worked for Jennings Bows, and I got to work on a 10 target, pneumatic (air) controlled, pop up 3D system! Now this was starting to get exciting. We now had a system that was fun and ran shoots at the shop with it, then of course took it to every one of our family’s fishing shows where thousands of people could shoot it. The pop-up 3D system was success, and so was our Moose Mountain Archery Center!
Move forward about six months. We had come to the conclusion that we had out grown our little ranch archery shop and need a more mainstream location. In our town of Agua Dulce, there was a grocery store that had always struggled due to its isolated location next to the popular Vasquez Rocks. Our growing customer base would come from all over Southern California to buy equipment and take lessons from us, so the isolated location we felt would be okay for us. After a little time and negotiation, we signed the lease, and it was time to pull all the abandoned market equipment out and build an archery shop! After a couple weeks of moving all the market equipment out, I then spent 7 weeks, 7 days a week from sun up to late in the night working on the shop.
After a few months of building, we were ready for our grand opening! We set up our pop up target system in our 12 lane, 20 yard indoor range. We held countless birthday parties, 4H, Boy Scout, Girl Scout groups there all the time. We ran a few different paper target leagues, JOAD on the weekends and 3D leagues. All this was great but it was our Holiday Shoots that were the best as we shot fun and different targets at these..... balloons on a track that went from one side of the range to the other, back and forth, ping pong balls on a blower, breath mints, and clay pigeons on the wall. These were the targets everyone loved to shoot—just like the thousands of new archers at the fishing shows.
During all of this my family and I would always try to get new blood in the sport and figure out creative ways to do this, we talked countlessly about how do we get outside industry sponsors into the sport and why they were not there already.
Speed up years later and now I’m with Doinker, traveling the world showing off our archery products we had to offer the world. I realized early on many issues with our sport, reasons why we don’t truly have a professional sports like golf and baseball, and why our sport is always having issues growing to the next level. We have so many archers around the world, the numbers are there to at least spawn something that could be great, different then anything anyone has seen before. I had so many ideas and one crazy one.... one I knew that would work from way back when I was a young archer but lacked the knowledge of how to make it work back then.
Race forward to a couple years ago. We had this crazy idea to build a carbon factory of our own. So I positioned myself in a world of composite industry people, attending composite expos, networking and meeting new people in the composite world. After a few months of hard work, I found a golf shaft factory that had just recently gone out of business. After many months of crazy negotiations and figuring out what we needed, the equipment was ours! Now we had to spend months moving everything from Mexico to our new nearby carbon factory.... Karbon Krafters in Lancaster CA. Now we had a ton of equipment to make golf shafts and had to figure out how to convert it all to make world class carbon stabilizers in the USA! When I started this journey, I never expected to learn so much about automation, hydraulics, electrical PLC and just basically everything electrical and mechanical. Since a lot of the equipment was not in working condition, I had to quickly learn at least the basics. Then there I was, designing and fabricating machines that we needed to do the job. Because of what I had learned from friends and family that had helped me get it all together, I now had the knowledge and better tuned skills to finally fabricate my game changing target system that had been on paper and in my head most of my life.
With the new Karbon Krafters finally up and running and our team that makes it up, really doing great at it. The time had come for me to take my creation and turn it into a reality. After many months of designing, fabricating, long countless hours hard at work in creating something I feel can change archery and all other shooting sports.
Now the system is ready and I have multiple patent pendings on its designs. I can show what has kept me hard at work. There are no scoring rings for hard to call line judgments that take up time, no foam animals that have scoring rings either or represent killing something (which I feel is a reason for the lack of outside sponsors).
I hope to have these in archery shops and running international leagues, pushing customers through their doors to help them keep them open in a time where all shops are struggling to keep them open. I hope that this system will attract new blood into our sport. I hope that it will spawn a new organization that will be able to attract BIG paying, outside industry sponsors. I hope this will do many things to take our sport to a truly professional sport!
What does this mean for your other archery ventures like Doinker?
We hope that Active Targets Systems and Break…. The Breakable Target Game will bring new life to our sport of archery as well as to all other shooting and throwing sports where hitting a target is the object. If archers like it as much as we know they will, the next generation of archers will help us to grow the sport and keep pro-shop doors open and all that support the industry will benefit from it.
The Archers Association of America negotiates discounts in travel and archery equipment for archers of all disciplines. To learn more or sign up, go to www.archersassociation.org.