Straight shot

Lystra Pitts and his wife, Deana, own Wasting Arrows, a sporting arrow company based in Sparks. Sporting arrow is the archery equivalent of skeet shooting, so instead of shooting at a stationary target, arrows are shot at foam targets that are tossed into the air. Wasting Arrows has been in business since March and provides sporting arrow equipment and lessons for kids and adults. Learn more at www.wastingarrows.com.

So how did you get into sporting arrows?

My son is in Boy Scouts, and we were looking at the activities for the jamboree next year [in West Virginia], and the activities on the website had all of these great things like rock climbing, rafting, archery and sporting arrows. And I’d never heard of sporting arrows before so I got online and started checking out all of the YouTube videos. And we thought it looked super fun. So we wanted to try it and tried searching locally and there’s no place around here that has it. We found out there’s a place in Phoenix, Arizona, that had it and thought that would be a really fun business to open here in Reno to bring it to Reno. I went out to Phoenix to try it out. One thing we wanted to make sure was you could actually do it. It looks really hard. … I’ve done archery before.

With all of these movies that feature archery, like The Hunger Games and Brave, has that impacted your business at all?

Yeah, we’re trying to tie into that. We’ve already had a lot of teenage girls come out and they’re like, “I’m channeling Katniss [protagonist of The Hunger Games]!” It’s awesome.

Yeah, I saw your table at the Sparks movie theater last weekend when Brave came out. Were people excited to have a chance to try out archery?

Yes, that’s what we’re going for. We’re hoping to get a bunch of little people who are trying to channel Merida [main character of Brave] now. It works out pretty good. It’s a really easy thing for people to pick up. We can teach people how to shoot. We have all of the equipment. Parents [won’t] go out and spend hundreds of dollars on a bow. We talked to so many people this weekend who were like, “Yeah, we bought a bow, and we don’t know where to shoot it.” Or no one’s ever been taught how to shoot it. Archery is a 20,000-year-old sport. Everybody knows how to shoot a bow. It’s instinctive, you know, it’s engrained in our DNA. But to get out there and actually do it, you know, there’s a right way and a wrong way. And we’re both USA Archery-certified archery instructors. And we can get out there and teach someone how to shoot a bow who has never done it before, and we’ve had lots of people who have never done it before and the first time they try it, they hit a target. They’re like, “Wow!”

Is there a competitive edge to this? Can you participate in competitions?

Yes. They’re forming the National Sporting Arrows Association. There’s going to be competitive shoots, kind of like skeet and those shotgun shooting sports.

What do you have to do to establish this in Nevada?

We’re starting a chapter. We’re going to host competitions.

Right now, your website says you’re a traveling company. So if a family wants to try this out, where do they go?

If you have over an acre of your own land, we can set up at your property. But we do have a location on USA Parkway off of Reno industrial park so they can come out and shoot with us there.