This year's inductees for the Illinois Outdoor Hall of Fame include an archer with an incredible resume tucked into his quiver.
Terry Wunderle has lived in Illinois all his life. Currently he resides outside of Mason City — at a prime vantage spot.
“We just loved it here and it’s a beautiful place and you can see from, oh, I don’t know, you can see things 40, 50 miles away,” he says, motioning to the water towers and grain bins of towns standing stark against the horizon.
Wunderle has spent a lot of his life with his eyes fixed on something much closer: the target at the end of an archery range. Archery started for him around six years old.
“I made a bow out of a tree limb, dad helped me a little bit,” Wunderle said. “The funny thing was, I didn’t have arrows.”
Wunderle fashioned dried horse weeds into the first arrows he would ever practice with. Primarily, he was interested in hunting, a passion that continues to this day. But, in his 30's, some friends talked him into a tournament.
“It wasn’t necessarily to win the tournament, I wanted to be a super deer hunter and I never wanted to miss a shot,” he said. “That was what enhanced my career more than anything, was the love of deer hunting.”
Wunderle shot on a wide variety of stages and levels, even competing in one world championship. The key to good performances, Wunderle says, is not thinking of competition in terms of winning or score in the moment, but focusing only on the task at hand.
He expands on this outlook in his book, "Archery: Think and Shoot Like A Champion."
“Any sport is mental control,” Wunderle says. “You know, you see people that are super good at practice, but they aren’t at performance.”
This is a philosophy Wunderle brought with him into his extensive coaching career. He still coaches young archers. He even mentored over Zoom during the pandemic.
When he first started coaching, he says others in the field were skeptical of his methods.
“I didn’t take any classes, anything else, how to coach, I just knew what I was looking for and what should be done and what the thinking should be,” Wunderle said.
Whatever you may think of Wunderle's methods, it's difficult to argue with the results. He's trained scores of high-performing athletes, including his son, Olympic archer Vic Wunderle. Vic started at five or six years old as well.
“[Vic] said ‘well dad, I’m too young, I think to shoot that,’ and I go ‘oh, that’s no problem, hand me your bow,’” Wunderle said. “So he hands me the bow, we start walking to the house, he says ‘what’s wrong?’ I said ‘well, when you’re old enough to shoot good form, you let me know and we’ll start shooting again.’ We get to the house and he says ‘I think I’m old enough now.’”
Wunderle's two daughters also competed on national and global levels, one made the US Women’s Archery Team for 20 straight years. The family bonded over archery. Wunderle recalls a drive home from a large tournament his daughter Sally competed in.
“Everybody was so excited and everything and Sally says ‘what are you guys so excited about? Was this a big tournament or something?’ And they said ‘well this was the national tournament’ or something. She goes ‘oh, I didn’t know that.’” Wunderle said. “And she just won it. She just went there to have fun and shoot the best she could shoot.”
While competition obviously plays a role in Wunderle's life, hunting is still his first love. When I speak to him, he's only a few hours back home from seeking deer on a crisp October morning. In the last twenty-five years, he tells me, he's missed only two days of hunting for his parents' funerals.
“1960, it was the first year I deer hunted and I killed a deer,” Wunderle said. “The funny thing was, almost every year since then, I killed a deer. I just fell in love with it.”
Like his competitions, Wunderle brings the foundation of a clear mind and singular focus to his hunting.
“I’m one of those deer hunters, I do not take a risky shot.” he says. “I don’t care how big the deer is.”
It's a lifelong dedication to a craft best honed in the outdoors, immortalized now with his name in the state's hall of fame.
