Archery, flag football and esports are among the latest extracurricular offerings from the East Tallahatchie School District Athletic Department.
District Athletic Director LaDon Taylor said the goal is to make competitive sports available to more members of the student body.
“We’re really trying to do some different things for our students and give them more options,” Taylor explained. “Everybody might not be able to play basketball or football or run track, and archery, flag football and esports are just something extra that we want to try to get going here to give some other kids opportunities to be a part of a team. Team sports are crucial to our kids.”
East Tallahatchie School District Athletic Director LaDon Taylor
Many lessons learned through participation in team sports — accountability, personal responsibility and self-discipline, to name a few — can pay dividends throughout life, he said.
“The school board and superintendent have been real supportive of trying to add more things for our kids,” Taylor noted.
Archery has been offered in the past at Charleston High School but has been absent from the lineup for years.
Ralph Horton, a school resource officer at Charleston Middle School who has been a big proponent of bringing back the sport, is the archery coach at CHS, Taylor added.
“He’s doing an amazing job with the kids. He spends a lot of time and effort on it.”
Currently, Horton has 10 archers, about half of whom are middle school students, noted Taylor.
“That’s a great way to build a program where we can start them at that age competing in archery,” Taylor said. “The kids have really worked hard on it and are doing fairly well.”
In recent weeks, CHS has participated in archery meets on the road against Bruce and at home against Water Valley. At Charleston, archery meets are held in the gymnasium.
Taylor said 300 is a good score for indoor archery competitions.
“When we went against Bruce, most of their kids, who have been shooting for a while, were in the range of 240 to 280. Our best one was 189, which is good, but we’re hoping to build archery up more than it has been in the past,” Taylor noted.
A sport sanctioned by the Mississippi High School Activities Association (MHSAA), Taylor said official archery champions are crowned for north and south state as well as an overall state champion in various classes.
“We’re hoping that we may get one or two who make the north half meet, which will be at Mississippi State,” Taylor explained. “Regardless, we want to try to take those kids to the north half this year just to get that experience.”
Charleston High School traditional sports include baseball and football for boys, softball for girls, and basketball, powerlifting and track for girls and boys.
As one of the nontraditional sports at CHS, archery is joined by girls volleyball, which just wrapped a second season; flag football, which will kick off its inaugural season later this month; and esports, which is finishing up its second year at CHS.
Esports, competitive electronic sports online — video games against live opponents on the internet — has become very popular in schools, colleges and universities around the world.
In Charleston, Taylor explained, esports occurs after the close of the school day. Coaches log in participating students to the computers for online play, and they continue to monitor students while they are online.
Esports is sanctioned by the MHSAA, which lists it under “Activities” rather than “Sports” on its website.
An esports state championship is held twice yearly, in the fall and spring, at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Taylor said.
On the MHSAA website, esports is filed under the “Activities” menu rather than “Sports.”
A male esports student at CHS recently drew some statewide attention for his skills, noted Taylor.
“Mississippi Delta Community College had been watching one of our players, and they were going to do a tournament with 30 of the top kids in the state in esports in Madden [football], and they called to see if the kid would be interested,” he said. “That was pretty impressive.”
Among other possible future extracurricular activities offered at CHS is choir.
“That’s going to be something coming maybe in the fall if we have enough kids to show interest,” said Taylor. “I think there are some competitions for that, so it would fall under athletics, as well.”
