About the International Field Archery Association
Dear Visitor,
Welcome to the official web site of the International Field Archery Association, also known as the IFAA.
The IFAA is an archery association that was formally founded 1970 (even though tournaments were already organised in Europe from 1967) when a group of field archers from the USA, Sweden, England, Scotland, Wales and Canada agreed on a set of basic rules by which Field Archery tournaments would be run. We now represent over 50 000 field archers in 45 member countries from all continents.
Although the IFAA is mainly an association for the amateur archer, new rules are now in place to accept and to provide competitions for professional archers without infringing on the status of our amateur archers. Our World and Regional events allow for archery competition at international level and we encourage the participation of all our affiliated archers at these events, irrespective of how well they can shoot. Amateur and Professional archers, although competing in the same event, shoot in different divisions.
Today most of our tournaments have 400 or more participants and some of these events have in excess of 1600 participants.
The IFAA is a member of TAFISA, the “The Association for International Sport for All”, an association with over 500 members and which is recognised by the IOC, as well as various other macro bodies.
Our game is either marked Field archery events, in which we shoot at paper target faces over known distances or unmarked Bowhunter events, in which case we shoot at either paper faces or 3D targets over unknown distances, all on a wide variety of terrain.
Member countries of the IFAA host the World Field Archery Championships in the even years and the World Bowhunter Championships, as well as our Indoor Archery Championships are held in the years after the World Field Championships.
In addition, the IFAA sanctions the annual championships of their six regions.
The rules of our events are well defined but have been kept as simple as possible. Your fellow archers administer these rules out on the courses, rather than judges, marshals or other officials. This format was very successful over the years and is appreciated by most of our archers.
The pages of this web site will introduce you to our various outdoor and indoor archery games and competitions as well as to the various styles of archery equipment that we permit. It explains the rules of the sport as conducted by the IFAA.
The web provides information about our administration and our member countries, events calendar, event scores and world records, tournament rules, IFAA history and much more. We regularly update the archery news as to what is happening in the world of the IFAA.
Please take your time to familiarize yourself with our sport. We hope to welcome you as a participant the next time that we host an event near to where you live or even to where you are visiting. Just look out for the forthcoming events and get in touch with the hosting association or the national association in your country.