"I would shoot six to eight hours a day when I was 16, 17 and 18," he said. "At that age, I was winning all the leagues, and I knew I was pretty good at it. I pretty much won everything at a local level, then traveled to a couple national tournaments and got my feelings hurt a little bit."

The hard work appears to have paid off, and Gillingham predicts that his success should continue in the coming years. He not only wants to be successful individually, he hopes that he might be able to increase the popularity of the sport he loves.

His neighbors were his first project, and several of them now shoot, but Gillingham has even bigger plans in the future.

"I would love to see archery promoted to the level that I think it can be," he said. "One of the problems now is it is basically only promoted to hunters. I think we need to promote the game to everybody, because it is really a lot of fun, and just about everyone you teach it to enjoys it."

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E-mail: ethomas@desnews.com@desnews.com