It's the most common frustration in self-taught archery: the groups won't settle. Not consistently high, not consistently left — just scattered, and differently scattered every end. So you adjust your aim, then your sight, then your grip, and the scatter politely absorbs every adjustment and carries on.
Here's the reframe that unsticks it: a scattered group usually isn't an aiming problem. It's a repeatability problem. Aim decides where the group centers; the shot cycle decides how tight it is. If the shot that launches each arrow is slightly different every time — different posture, different anchor, different release — then perfect aim would still scatter, because you're aiming a different machine on every arrow. To shrink groups, stop asking "where did it hit?" and start asking "was that the same shot as the last one?"
The four repeatability leaks
Almost all scatter flows from a handful of shot-to-shot variations, and they're all camera-visible:
A base that drifts. Feet slightly wider, slightly more open, weight a little different every end. Everything above the floor launches from a rotated platform — and it feels identical from inside.
An anchor that wanders. If your head dips or tips to meet the string, the "same" anchor lands on a face that's somewhere new each shot. Your rear sight is moving. The rule: the string comes to your face, never the reverse.
A hold that isn't still. Creep — the draw hand drifting forward while you aim — means the shot releases from a slightly different draw on every arrow. Back tension letting go quietly is invisible to you and obvious on video.
A finish that changes. A hand that sometimes snaps back along the neck and sometimes flies outward is two different releases sharing one bow. The follow-through frames tell you which one showed up.
Notice what's on that list: nothing about your arrows, your rest, your sight. Equipment consistency matters — but the human is almost always the bigger variable, and the human is the one you can improve for free.
Why the target face makes this worse
The cruel joke is that the target itself hides the cause. While you're at full draw negotiating with the gold, your attention budget is spent — there's nothing left to notice the creeping hand or dipping head. And afterward, the arrow's position tells you that something varied, never what. The target is a scoreboard, not a coach.
The drill — Blank-Bale Form Shooting
So take the target away. Two ends of six arrows at the start of every session, three to five meters from a bare target butt — nothing to aim at, nothing to score, always with a proper backstop. With aiming costing zero, your full attention lands on the thing that actually shrinks groups: making this shot identical to the last one. Give each end one theme — same feet, still head, quiet hold, held finish — and let the repeatability get built where the scoreboard can't interrupt.
Then measure the machine instead of the holes. Film one arrow per session — phone on a tripod behind the shooting line, whole body in frame, one arrow per clip — and let CoachVision read it. It will tell you honestly: the camera shows the shot, not the target, so it will never pretend to know where an arrow landed. What it gives you is a measured read of the four leaks — stance, head stillness, hold, finish — which is exactly the information the target face was hiding. Fix the repeatability on video, and the groups on paper will follow it down. They always do.