Feature Stories
On target
Brooklyn teacher hits mark with championship archery team
Erica Berger
Under Coach Udi Hazan's guidance, the Academy of Hospitality and Tourism archery team won the New York State championship in 2015.
Erica Berger
Eleventh-grader Liz Morency proudly pulls her bull's eye from the target.
Erica Berger
Getting ready to draw back his bow.
During team practice, Coach Udi Hazan keeps a sharp eye on the form of each of his archers at the Academy of Hospitality and Tourism in Brooklyn. He adjusts elbows and shoulders before he blows his whistle and the arrows fly at the targets 45 feet away.
Liz Morency, an 11th-grader, was a star of that day’s practice with two bull’s-eyes. She exploded the balloon Hazan had attached to the target’s bull’s-eye for the final shoot.
“The psychology of the balloons is they become incentives,” he explained.
The school’s co-ed archery team has two hours a week in the gym it shares with other schools on the Erasmus Hall Campus. With precision, the students wheel out the equipment cart and set up the targets while Hazan measures arm and arrow lengths before each member selects the bow best suited to his or her size and weight.
The whistle blows, bowstrings snap and suddenly the gym is filled with the pops of arrows hitting the targets.
Hazan smiles as he remembers all the raised eyebrows when he first suggested forming an archery team at the school. He acknowledged it could be considered dangerous. But when he pointed out that archery is an Olympic sport that develops “concentration and pride in the students who participate,” he won over the skeptics.
As a member of the national Olympic Archery for Schools organization, Hazan had to train and qualify to become an archery coach. He adds that to his other coaching skills developed over 18 years as a physical education teacher.
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Erica Berger
Hazan adjusts the stance of this student, who went on to place first in the girl's competition in the Battle of the Boroughs.
The students have excelled under his guidance. The team is the New York State archery champion. In the fierce Battle of the Boroughs in February, his archers put on a winning show against the other 100 archers from New York City schools, with one student from the school taking first place in the girls’ competition and two others taking second and third place in the boys’ competition.
Chapter Leader Jack Shvarts spoke of the school’s pride in its winning team. He pointed to a huge poster thanking the UFT for its $500 donation to offset the cost of the team’s trip to the national championships in Florida last June.