3D Score Zones

I’ll wager that most people are familiar with a target that looks kind of like this:

Seems simple enough. Aim in the centre. If you count out the rings, you’ll often find that there are 10 or so of them - score in the middle, you get a 10. Then one less point for every ring out from that.

But what about when your targets look like this?

This is a bit more challenging - not only are you not aiming in the middle of a nice big circle, the score zones aren’t colour-coded! In fact…where are the score zones?

Let’s look at one target in a bit more detail - and it’s a big target. Here’s the Rinehart Woodland Elk.

See that funny-looking section in the middle? The one shaped kind of like a liver? Well, inside that is your score zone. For 3D archery, we have four score zones: 11, 10, 8, 5 (and 0 for a miss).

To help us out with this, let’s colour the target kind of like that circular target.

That’s a bit easier.

Based on the colours, here’s the zones (or go from the innermost zone and work your way out):

Yellow: 11
Red: 10
Blue: 8
Uncoloured (excluding antlers): 5
Antlers (or miss): 0

In 3DAAA, you only need your arrow to touch the line of a zone to take the higher-scoring zone - sometimes 1mm makes all the difference! This is the same for the antlers - if you’re touching the body colour, you’ve managed to scrape a 5.

The innermost zone in yellow is the 11. This zone comes to play at 3DAAA sanctioned events (and some special events), but we don’t use the 11 at PSA club shoots - if you hit an 11, you just get a 10.

Still confused? That’s alright - it can be a bit confusing to read, but you pick up on it pretty quickly out when you’re out on the range with people who know the ropes.

If you come out to the club, we’ll send you out with folks who will have no worries with helping you learn the ins and outs - and soon you can be the one telling newbies how to score their targets!