MORGANTOWN – Some brought their own bows and others used ones provided at the practice, but all in all, more than 30 Butler County High School students spent the better part of Tuesday afternoon honing their archery skills.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, students gather in the Butler County Extension Service’s new headquarters in the former Pamida building to practice with the bow.

In a large, wide-open room, a row of targets stood waiting for the teenagers to launch arrows at them.

Robert McKee, who coaches the archery program, said he has loved the sport since he picked it up in high school.

“It was basically for bow hunting white-tailed deer,” he said. “That’s how I got involved. I had a couple of my friends teach me how to shoot.”

McKee frequently tells his students that archery is “90 percent mental.”

“You don’t have to be a jock to shoot a bow,” he said. “Actually, I can teach anybody to shoot a bow. You don’t have to be the natural athlete. You can be just an average person who feels like you have no skills and I can have you hitting that target pretty quick and you start, it builds your confidence.”

Butler County Schools’ archery program – which has sizable teams at the high school, middle school and the district’s two elementary schools – is part of the National Archery in the Schools Program.

McKee said the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources brought NASP to Kentucky while he was working for the department as a hunter education coordinator.

A few years before retiring in 2016, McKee joined with local parents and urged Butler County Schools to start its own NASP-affiliated archery program.

“Other counties around us were doing it, and I’d always wanted to see my home county have a team, and so we worked through the board here and through the principals and got them on board with starting the program here in the schools,” he said.

In addition to coaching the team, McKee also teaches an archery unit of the high school’s physical education classes in the fall.

“Even though it was a part of my job, you’d feel like you’d want to get away from it. I love this and I love still working with the kids,” he said.

McKee said he still shoots regularly.

“I have to stay current here a little bit, just to be able to sort of practice what I preach and to tell the kids and to show them that, yes, it can be done,” he said.

While interest in archery was surprisingly large when the program was launched, McKee has been pleased to see participation grow.

This year, there are 36 students in the program at the high school, more than 70 at the middle school and roughly 60 spread between the two elementary schools, according to McKee.

The main reason the program has such a widespread appeal, McKee said, is the lack of physical limitations in the sport.

“I’ve got some athletes, but I’ve also got the nonathlete here, and so a kid who couldn’t maybe dribble a ball or wasn’t big enough to play football … can shoot a bow, so now they can compete and be a part of that part of the school curriculum. They can be part of a sports team,” he said.

Sophomore Trentin Embry joined the team this year and said he’s been hitting the target consistently.

Embry said his mother was a good archer when she was in high school, so he wanted to try it for himself.

He said the secret to archery is staying consistent when you find out what works. “You’ve got to always have the same anchor point, the same stance,” he said.

Kaylee VanMeter, a BCHS junior, joined the program three years ago after her friends recruited her.

Echoing the oft-repeated advice from McKee – the insistence that archery is mostly a mental game – VanMeter said staying focused and calm are key.

“If you do bad, you can’t think about it,” she said.

VanMeter appreciates the constant solo drive for self-improvement and the way the program, by combining teammates’ scores during tournaments, creates the aspects of a team sport as well.

“You’re on your own, but it’s kind of a team sport,” she said.

– Follow Daily News reporter Jackson French on Twitter @Jackson_French or visit bgdailynews.com.