The Think Tank

Mom and I are on our way back from Vegas.  As I write this we are passing through Boise.  (Technology is pretty cool these days).

The third and final day went pretty well for me.  I shot a 299/22X which is exactly dead-on my statistical average for the year, so I can’t be too upset.  I would have liked to shoot a 300 of course, but I made a cardinal mistake on one shot, and that’s what happens.  That gave me a total of 896/58X out of a possible 900/90X.  That’s a tad below my average, thanks to the 298 on the first day and the lousy X count on Saturday, but all in all its in the range of normal, so I’m pretty satisfied.

I improved a fair amount over last year’s performance, both in terms of score and placement.  Last year I shot an 894 and 60-some X’s, and finished 12 in the Second Flight – which translated to around 49th overall as I recall.  This year I improved my position each day.  After Friday I was 35th, after Saturday I was 27th, and I finished 16th overall (out of 875 competitors in my division).  I joked that if I had a couple more days, I could win the thing!

Unfortunately that was not good enough to finish in the money.  Only the top 8 archers in each Flight won prizes.  I guess that’s why there is always next year.

Here are some interesting stats about the tournament:

• 2,520 archers took part in this years event.
• Of those, 427 came from foreign lands, representing 39 countries.
• Each of the 50 US States plus American Samoa were represented by at least one archer.
• California and Arizona contributed the largest of number of archers, at 422 and 206 respectively.  58 archers from Oregon made the trek, while 86 Washingtonians were in attendance.
• More than $216,000 dollars in prize money was awarded across all of the various divisions, plus an additional $24,000 dollars in scholarships were awarded to the winners of the junior divisions.