WCW FITA – Day 1
by Chris on Apr.30, 2011, under Archery, Main Page
Mom and I came up to Seattle last night so I could shoot in a club-hosted STAR FITA event this weekend, which is just a fancy way to say that this tournament meets all of the qualifications of a US Archery Association shoot, and therefore any score shot at this eventcounts towards team qualifications and national and/or world records.
Sadly, I do not have to worry about breaking any national or world records this weekend. Today stunk to high heaven. I experimented with an adjustment to my rest yesterday, actually making the arrow tune out as it should instead of relying on group-tuning, which is to say adjusting things until it seems to group well despite the arrow being all catiwhompass on the bow. It seemed to be working alright yesterday afternoon, but today was a whole different story.
Sadly still, I can’t blame it all on that. I shot pretty badly on top of everything, not holding well, executing poorly and eventually I got very frustrated and had a hard time even thinking straight, much less shooting straight.
I shot a 1335 today, which is 105 points off perfect. It wasn’t the worst score I’ve ever shot, but it was definitely among the worst I can remember. (To give some contrast, National Champions are shooting right around 1400, and you can probably make the US Archery Team if you stay in the 1380’s. Decent guys at the state level shoot around the 1360’s. I expected to shoot around 1350-1360 and I sailed smoothly under that bar without even rustling my hair.)
They didn’t get around to posting the scores by the time I left, so I don’t know for sure, but the only guy I saw who was scoring worse than me was the poor fellow who lost an arrow early in the morning and only had five arrows left to shoot… which is problematic, since you are actually supposed to shoot six arrows at a time.
Oh well.
Seems like every post I’ve made about a tournament since my return to archery has been pretty much just like this one: not the worst I’ve ever done, but very far below where I think I should be at this stage, which in turn is along way under where I was. This one was more disappointing to me the others, since I’ve been practicing pretty well lately, so I thought I might actually be able to do something respectable this weekend.
I did put the rest back during lunch, and the second half of the day was better, although not terribly impressive given that we were at the close distances. Still, it did give me a little glimmer of hope for tomorrow.
We will start out tomorrow with an elimination round at 10 AM, and follow that up with 900 round in the afternoon.
