Foley is set to draw a national television audience this week as the Hoyt Archery Pro/Am, the season-opening event for the Archery Shooters Association (ASA), makes its sixth consecutive appearance in Baldwin County. For the first time, coverage of the competition will extend beyond online streaming to reach viewers through the Sportsman Channel, a cable network with roughly 28 million subscribers.
How the tournament works
The tournament, which runs Thursday through Sunday at Graham Creek Nature Preserve on Wolf Bay Drive, features top competitors from around the country shooting at three-dimensional animal targets set in a natural, wooded environment rather than the traditional circular targets used at a fixed distance. The format has become popular with both competitors and spectators for its realism and variety.
Three-dimensional, or 3D, archery asks shooters to judge distance themselves — no rangefinders, no marked yardage — and to read terrain the way a hunter would, with targets placed along paths through the preserve’s pine woods, creek bottoms and marsh-edge terrain. Every shot scores by ring placement on each animal target, and a missed distance judgment by even a few yards can turn a clean hit into a miss, which is why the format rewards the same skills hunters use in the field. Graham Creek’s several hundred acres of protected habitat along Wolf Bay’s tributaries give the course the natural setting that makes the broadcast worth watching even for viewers who have never drawn a bow.
The broadcast deal
Competition Archery Media (CAM), which has partnered with ASA in previous years to stream the event’s final rounds on Facebook, worked with the Sportsman Channel to secure the new broadcast deal. According to CAM general manager Josh Grine, the expanded coverage reflects a shared goal among organizers to grow the sport of 3D archery and introduce it to new audiences.
Grine noted that last year’s Hoyt Pro/Am Shoot Down drew nearly 180,000 views online. With the addition of the Sportsman Channel, the My Outdoor TV streaming platform and expanded Facebook coverage this year, organizers believe the event has the potential to reach tens of millions of viewers combined. The Sportsman Channel alone counts more than 800,000 followers on its own Facebook page, in addition to its cable subscriber base.
The tournament’s marquee event, the Pro Pressure Point Shoot Down, will take place Saturday at 4 p.m. at the Foley Event Center on East Pride Boulevard, where the top-ranked professional archers compete head-to-head in an elimination format.
The move to cable is the step organizers of niche outdoor sports have been working toward for years: streaming proved there was an audience, and television puts the sport in front of casual viewers who will never search for an archery livestream. The Pressure Point format translates especially well to the medium — elimination brackets, known faces and a ticking clock compress cleanly into a broadcast hour in a way that a four-hour field round never can.
Foley’s sports tourism bet
City officials say the event’s growth over the past six years reflects a broader strategy to position Foley as a destination for sports tourism. David Thompson, the city’s director of recreation and sports tourism, credited ongoing investment in facilities and support from the mayor and city council for making it possible to host a production of this scale.
Thompson said the city’s partnership with organizations like ASA has become an important part of Foley’s local economy, drawing visitors who return to the area again and often become repeat guests long after the competition ends.
Grine said the transition from online-only streaming to television has been smoothed by years of experience producing high-quality footage for the event’s Facebook broadcasts. While this marks the first ASA event to air on the Sportsman Channel, organizers said they have no concerns about executing the production in Foley, citing the strong working relationship built with the city and the Foley Event Center staff over multiple years.
Foley’s rise as a tournament host mirrors the city’s growth generally. Sitting inland from the beach towns but minutes from the Foley Sports Tourism Complex and the event center, the city has spent heavily on fields, courts and facilities that allow it to book youth championships, collegiate events and pro competitions through seasons when hotel occupancy would otherwise sag. Archery fits the strategy well: the sport’s Gulf Coast following is deep, its competitors travel with family and gear, and a multi-day event spreads spending across restaurants, outfitters and lodging across southern Baldwin County.
Moodie adds AFC Mobile coaching role
In other local sports news, University of South Alabama women’s soccer coach Richard Moodie is taking on an additional role as director of coaching for the AFC Mobile Academy, the development arm of Mobile’s minor league soccer club. The academy aims to build a pipeline of players from its junior program through its senior teams.
Moodie, who has been involved with the AFC Mobile Academy project since its inception and coached the girls’ team last fall, will continue leading the Jaguars as the college team prepares for an upcoming match against the University of Montevallo. He said the growth of soccer in the local community was a driving factor behind taking on the added responsibility.
AFC Mobile competes in the National Premier Soccer League, with its 2021 season scheduled to run from May through July. Steve Wieczorek, the club’s technical director, first-team head coach and men’s soccer coach at Spring Hill College, said Moodie’s experience working with the academy last fall made him the clear choice to lead the coaching staff and help implement the club’s playing philosophy across all age levels.
With Moodie’s appointment, boys’ director Ruben Risco will shift into an advisory role while continuing to serve as a first-team assistant coach and club ambassador. Wieczorek praised Risco’s contributions in helping establish the academy in its early stages.
AFC Mobile will continue to host home matches at the Archbishop Oscar H. Lipscomb Athletic Complex in Mobile, with a full schedule and season ticket information expected to be released soon. The club also took over management of the Mobile County Soccer Complex last October and recently hosted its inaugural Mardi Gras Camp there for players from kindergarten through eighth grade.
What it means for the Gulf Coast
Taken together, the archery broadcast and the academy appointment describe the same thing happening on two fields: Gulf Coast sports outgrowing local streaming and local leagues. Foley’s tournament now sells itself to a cable network; Mobile’s soccer club now staffs its youth pipeline with a Division I head coach. For residents, the practical effect is the same in both cases — bigger events, better coaching and more reasons for visiting families to come back next season.
Spectators planning to attend the Pro/Am should note the split between venues: the field rounds run all four days at Graham Creek, where the wooded course rewards comfortable shoes and weather-appropriate clothing, while the Saturday afternoon Shoot Down moves indoors to the event center, where the elimination bracket unfolds in a stadium setting with seating, concessions and the cameras rolling for television. Organizers say admission details and daily schedules are available through ASA channels, and they encourage first-time viewers to catch the Shoot Down, which is the easiest introduction to the sport’s drama the Pro/Am offers.
The ASA itself is worth understanding for newcomers. The Archery Shooters Association runs a national Pro/Am tour that draws thousands of amateur shooters alongside the professional field, with classes for nearly every age and equipment style, from youth beginners to compound and traditional divisions. For many families the Pro/Am is a vacation built around a competition: amateurs shoot the same course the pros do, and juniors can watch the world’s best archers work the range between their own rounds.
Graham Creek Nature Preserve adds a dimension most tournament venues cannot. The preserve protects habitat along the upper reaches of Wolf Bay and its tributary creeks, with boardwalks, trails and interpretive features that operate year-round for hikers, birders and school groups. Hosting the Pro/Am introduces that landscape to thousands of visitors who might otherwise never see it — and gives the city a venue where an outdoor competition can be staged without clearing a single acre that isn’t already protected for exactly this kind of use.
The economics ripple across southern Baldwin County during tournament week. Archery competitors travel with bows, targets and family in tow, and they book the week around ranges and restaurants in Foley, Gulf Shores and the surrounding communities. Repeat visitation — the metric Thompson emphasized — is how a single event compounds: families that discover the beach towns and the preserve during a Pro/Am weekend return the following summer without a competition to draw them, which is the truest test of whether sports tourism works.
The television audience brings its own long-term stakes. Outdoor programming on the Sportsman Channel reaches exactly the viewership most likely to book a Gulf Coast fishing or hunting trip, and a broadcast that shows off Foley’s facilities and Baldwin County’s landscape doubles as an hour of destination marketing. Organizers’ hope of tens of millions of combined impressions is, read from the city’s side of the ledger, a publicity campaign the city did not have to buy.
For Moodie and the academy, meanwhile, the appointment signals AFC Mobile’s next phase. A club that began as a semi-pro outfit has been assembling a full structure — first team, academy, camp programming and management of the county soccer complex — that mirrors how successful lower-division clubs develop players and revenue. Putting a college head coach over the coaching staff gives the academy continuity from the youngest age groups to the senior team, which is the pipeline model the club has said it wants.
The timing fits the sport’s trajectory along the Gulf Coast, where high school programs, club soccer and the NPSL side have grown together over the past decade. Moodie’s dual role — leading South Alabama’s women’s program while directing the academy’s philosophy — mirrors the arrangement Wieczorek already holds with Spring Hill, and it gives Mobile something few cities its size have: a coherent, connected coaching lineage across the college, club and youth levels of the same sport.
Both stories this week point the same direction for Gulf Coast sports. The archery tournament arrives as a national broadcast; the soccer academy gets a professionalized coaching structure; and the cities hosting them — Foley and Mobile — are building the facilities and relationships that make the next event easier to land than the last.