After three days of competition at the Kentucky Fair and Exposition Center, the Washington Demon high school archery team finished the 2015 National Archery in the Schools’ Programs National Shoot among the top 80 high school programs in the nation.

More than 12,000 archers, from 763 schools across 43 states participated in this year’s shoot.  After finishing their shoot Friday morning, the Washington archery team scored a program best 3277 points. When the final rankings posted on Saturday evening, the Demon archers were slated as the 80th best high school team in the nation out of 192 who competed. Washington also was rated the seventh best archery program in Iowa out of the 12 high schools who qualified for the national shoot.

Washington head archery coach Jolleen Cerka says she was pleased at how her entire team performed at the National Shoot, “We’ve been shooting and shooting and keeping scores (in practice) and they had been going up and down.” Cerka said, “To come in here on (Friday) and have a majority of our kids were in the 260 range and higher and a lot of them were in the 270’s and 280’s, I was really pleased with the way they came through.”

The Demons’ best individual performance came off the bow of senior Kyle Basten, who scored a personal-best 284 out of a possible 300 points in his final high school archery shoot. Basten’s performance is the 41st best among the 371 high school boys’ seniors participating, and was the 255th best performance out the entire 6570 person boys’ division.

Sophomore John Sands (284; 58th best 10th grade boy), junior Joseph Dalziel (279; 93rd best 11th grade boy), junior Jade Wells (276; 83rd best 11th grade girl), sophomore Grace Shafer-Smith (273; 82nd best 10th grade girl), and fifth grader Olin Wells (272; 75th best 5th grade boy) were among the Demons who scored in the top 100 in their age group.

This was the second straight year the Washington High School archery team participated in the NASP National Shoot, improving their score by 69 points from last year.

The Demons also participated in the NASP International Bowhunting Organitzation’s 3D shoot Friday afternoon, where athletes shot at foam replicas of animals. Sands had the best performance in the 3D shoot for Washington, posting 283 points. The effort was the seventh best among the 139 high school sophomore boys who took part in the event, and finished in 46th overall among the 1623 person boys’ division.