Archery coach Larry Brown teaches bow an...

Archery coach Larry Brown teaches bow an...

Viorel Florescu for New York Daily News

Archery Instructor Larry Brown teaching one of several archery classes he conducts in public schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx. 

In support of the bon mot that we should all learn something every day, I pass along this jewel of an in sight from archery coach Larry Brown.

You dont unlearn, you just add on to what you know, Brown said. You dont stop doing something, you add something new to it and what you used to do fades away.

That perspective has made Brown a winning archery coach - his all-woman, 2003-2004 Columbia University Archery Club team finished second in the nation.

Over the last eight years Brown, 59, has shared his bow and arrow expertise with children as young as third grade (Thats when they have the strength to pull the bow, he said) to adults in their 80s.

Thanks to fellow archer Natasha Greens Hidden Gems Foundation; the Easton Foundation, the grant-making arm of Easton Archery, the largest archery equipment company in the country, and the Children's Aid Societys Sports and Recreation program, Brown has taught archery in afterschool programs at several public schools in Bronx including at Fannie Lou Hamer High and Fannie Lou Hamer Middle School, IS 98, and Community School 61.

He does weekly classes at PS 69, also in the Bronx which is not a part of the Childrens Aid Society program and at the Portledge School, a private school in Locust Valley, L.I. On Saturday he teaches children and adults at IS 171, the Eagle Academy, in Brooklyn.

In 2008 Brown organized several of his outstanding students into the Center Shot Archers, which he said is the only black and Hispanic team on the competitive archery circuit.

Still, Browns schedule is down from the 12 schools a week he used to visit few years ago, because some of those schools have been closed.

I left Columbia to teach archery in the public school system because it never gets taught here, he said. Historically many black and Hispanic kids never get involved with archery. Most of the kids I deal with now are black and Hispanic.

A professional photographer who is certified by the USA Archery & National Field Archery Association to teach arch ery instructors, Brown has been drawing back bowstrings since he was five years old, when his father introduced him to the sport.

He loves it as much now as he did then.

Archery makes you deal with you, Brown said. It makes you deal with trying to figure out how to do something correctly.

Brown and two of his five brothers learned archery from their father, Ellek Brown, a gospel-singing boyhood friend of the late famed soul singer James Brown the two grew up in the same Augusta, Ga. neighborhood.