The Think Tank

This weekend was the 59th annual Sherwood Nottingham archery match, which is an annual tournament between Sherwood, Oregon and Nottinghamshire, England.  This year was a particular treat because 4 archers from Britain made the trip to the US to shoot with us.  Getting to spend time with them and discuss the differences in how they run their shoot vs. ours was really fun.  2016 will be the anniversary (1956-2016) and us Yanks want to have as many people as possible cross the pond to do the same thing.  Mom, Mo, Shannon and myself are making early plans to head to England in 2016.  It has always been a dream of ours to go over and shoot in both events, and it sounds like we might finally get to make that dream come true.

On a personal note, this years event went well for me.  My Saturday score was 888, which was a little substandard as far as I was concerned, but not completely outside the realm of acceptability.  I wanted to stay at or above an 890 for the weekend, so I wasn’t far off, but I needed to pick it up the second day.  Both of the last two years I missed the tournament record by one point, and I really wanted to get it this year.  Last year I was in great position after the first day but didn’t shoot well enough on Sunday to get it done.  That has bugged me all year.

Sunday I really buckled down and tried to shoot smart.  The wind was gusting a bit, not terribly strong, but it was continually changing directions which made it difficult know how to correct for it.  I finished the first 30 arrows down 5 points at 60 yards, which is a respectable score, and then I shot a perfect 50 yard score.  That was a first for me and it really helped me get on the right side of the numbers for my goal.  40 yards should be easy enough to clean, but I always wind up dropping at least one, and Sunday was no different.  My first arrow at 40 missed to the right.  It felt like a good shot, but the wind had been blowing pretty strong right-to-left on the last two targets at 50, and it reversed and was blowing strongly left-to-right at 40.  I adjusted my sight a little bit before shooting at 40, but apparently not enough.   After that one point I shot pretty well, only dropping 5 X’s the rest of the way.

On top of my own personal outcomes, the Sherwood teams swept in every class where we had enough participants to form a full team: Senior Compound, Master Compound, Junior Recurve, and most importantly, Senior Recurve, which means that the US again gets to keep the silver bowl here in this country for another year.  We’ve held the bowl here since 1996.

On a personal note, I wound up breaking three records:  my own one-day record from last year with an 894 (last year was an 891); the one-day 50 yard record with a perfect 300 (the old record was 298 and had been set by Don Kudlacek a long time ago); and the overall record with a 1782 (the previous record was 1775 and had stood since 2001).

If you are interested, here is some information about the shoot: http://www.robinhoodfestival.org/archery.html