The 12-year-old is becoming a force in the archery world
Learning how to shoot a bow and arrow is one of the few sports kids can enjoy while simultaneously improving hand-eye coordination, focus, confidence, patience, and relaxation.
If you follow archery, commit the name Jonathan Leska to your memory now. If you don’t know him, and you have the opportunity to meet him, do so. You’ll be glad later.
Jonathan is 12 years old and lives in Cornwall with his mom and dad, Kristin and Jonathan, and sister Lily. He’s a typical seventh grader at Cornwall Central Middle School who enjoys playing soccer, baseball, and flag football; he’s a good student whose favorite subject is math, and his most favorite thing to do is to be outside.
Johnny, as he is mostly known, is also a competitive archer … he shoots a bow and arrow in 3D and compound competitions around the country. And he’s good. Really good.
“It’s fun,” the modest young man said in an interview recently. “I like challenging myself.”
Of course, sometimes modesty goes by the wayside. When asked if he prefers indoor or outdoor competitions better, he said he prefers the outdoor courses, but “I crush indoors,” he said.
Let’s back up. Johnny was given his first bow and arrow by the family’s neighbor, Chris Kirwan, when he was five years old.
“His kids did it and he thought I would like to try too,” Johnny said. “He’s the whole reason I got into this.”
His dad explains that he started practicing in their yard and moved on to the Black Rock Forest archery program that first winter. Then, at age six, he won his first second-place trophy. While Johnny loves the sport, it was probably about then that his competitive nature surfaced.
He shoots a compound bow, which looks like a tactical weapon. Those who know little about the sport might struggle to recognize it as a bow. The more typical “Robin Hood style” is called a longbow (it’s not a simple arch). A third style is called a recurve and is that arch one envisions. (“Terminology is incredibly confusing in this sport,” Kristin says!)
Speaking of tactical weapons, Johnny is also proficient at the range shooting guns. His steady hand and good eye serve him well in both sports.
His dad had shot bows in the past, but for hunting purposes, not competitively. But now, the sport has consumed both father and son, with the elder Leska tasked with not only traveling to competitions — most recently California, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey — as well as helping Johnny with his training, making his arrows, and keeping up with what’s happening in the national archery scene.
Johnny currently shoots a Mathews Archery bow that was built for him. He’s on his third bow in his young career — he started with a child-size one and now uses a woman’s bow that’s about half his height due to his current size. As he grows and becomes stronger, he’ll move up to an even larger model.
He has a professional trainer (Heritage Archery Academy) in Phelps, NY, four hours away, where he is learning some further archery skills. But Johnny says he also learns a lot by attending competitions and watching other archers.
This coming winter, he and his dad will travel to Las Vegas for a major competition. His mom and sister enjoy watching him compete, but because of work and school schedules, they don’t travel to the far-away events. Kristin is a teacher in the Highland Falls-Fort Montgomery Central School District and its longtime varsity soccer coach. Johnny and Lily have grown up around O’Neill’s varsity soccer players.
John said that while Johnny enjoys watching competitors at various events, people are starting to notice him, too.
“People know who he is; he’s getting recognition,” John said.
That rang true this past spring when the family opened a recent copy of the National Field Archery Association’s magazine, and there were not only Johnny’s first-place results from a California competition but also his photo in a collage of competitors.
While sitting for an interview, Johnny was wearing a Nike T-shirt that said ‘Focus, Focus, Focus’. That might well be the young man’s personal motto as he continues to compete in a sport way beyond most 12-year-olds, or for that matter, just about everyone.