Archival Archery Archery News
Issue 33 - Midsummer Summary
June 12, 2003

In this newsletter:
State Field Results
State JOAD Target Tournament
The Olympics Are Coming
Softwares For Archery
JOAD National Info, World Champs Info, and the NArchival Archery National Target Champs, Gold Cup Results
Using the Archival Archery Website To Your Advantage, or "big numbers"
You Think You Have Trouble Finding The Gold?
Buffalo Field Archery Adds a FITA Range Capability
More Fun Archery Links
2003 State Target Championship

State Field Results
The Archival Archery State Field tournament was held on May 10-11, 2003 in Eagle Lake with yet again a new record number of participants.

In 2001 the number of participants was 24, a tie with prior years, and 2002 saw a record 39 archers. But in 2003 that record was blown away by the participation of 59 adult and youth archers. The venue was an exotic animal farm, and in keeping with that Nolan Blaschke, the owner and our host, served up a A Style BBQ of Elk.

Windy the first day and calm the second, the conditions were perfect from a Texan's point of view. Add a light sprinkle of rain on one afternoon and the adventure of shooting a tough and challenging course was complete. A number of pictures are available on the Archival Archery website at this link, and of course, the results are posted here. Congratulations to many participants, and after reading this and viewing the pictures, make a promise to yourself: Next year, help set yet another record by attending.

The Olympics Are Coming
Can it be? We are only a year away from the Olympics and Paralympics in Athens, Greece! As the event draws near, expect to see and hear more about it, of course. The U.S.O.C. has chosen a new logo and a new look, and begun to create marketing tools to capture our attention. To see a very good summary streaming video, which includes a couple of quick shots of archers, use this link - note that you need audio to hear the movie, and broadband will work better to download it (HINT: CLICK ON THE "LOOK OF THE TEAM" teaser).

The Jr. USAT team, including some archers that have not yet met the basic pre-requisite score but otherwise hold promise of doing so, plan to join together at a camp to be held at the Colorado Springs Olympic Training Center in the week after the upcoming JOAD National Target Championship in Denver. To see what the place looks like you can go to a series of 360 degree pictures of it right here.

You can also subscribe to a nifty email newsletter from the US Olympic Organization. Click here to see the latest issue of their newsletter to see if it is something you would like to get automatically. In this day of receiving torrents of unwanted spam, it's a nice change of pace to get this kind of information.

Softwares For Archery
A new page has been created on the Archival Archery website to provide a summary of all the softwares now available for archery. In the past there were only programs for desktop computers, then for the Palm Pilot Operating System (OS), and finally a few are showing up for the hand held computers running the Windows PocketPC OS (PPC).
There is, of course, the Target Plot (Palm OS) which is perhaps the most powerful and specifically attuned to target archery software. The authors, Trevor Hancock and Marianne Rieckmann, are both programmers AND archers from down under - Target Plot was originally developed for the Aussie Olympic Archery Team of 2000 (which took the GOLD in men's division). They are still making enhancements to TP, including a planned version for the Windows PocketPC, so you can provide input, suggestion, etc. using this link.

There is a very interesting looking program from Spain - the current drawback for this writer is that I'm not fluent in Spanish, so the pages are a little inscrutable <G> and the software is for the PPC only. But the pictures look good! The best part is that the author, Fernando de Diego, is currently making his programs available free for the download - including an excel spreadsheet.

Another interesting program is a shareware program for the Palm OS - shareware is designed to work either partially, or else for a limited time before dying, and if you like it you pay for a code that in turn activates the program fully. John Newell of the Dunstable Bowmen club in the British Isles has written the Archery Suite, which looks very promising. The folks in Idaho wanted something to use in scoring their 3D and Field shoots, and wrote the Electronic Score Card for the Palm.

So to view descriptions and find links on these and other programs, check out the software summary page on the Archival Archery site. And if there is nothing there you like on that one page, remember that, including the album pages containing photos, there are more than 4,000 pages for you to view on the Archival Archery website.

Of course, we are eager to hear from other programmers and archers who have programs we don't have listed. Email the webmaster with your suggestions, and if you find something you really like, let me know what that is.

Results for the NJ Gold Cup were recently posted. (Note: this is an acrobat file).

Using the Archival Archery Website To Your Advantage, or "big numbers"
The main page of the AA website offers many shortcuts, some obvious and some not so obvious.You can use the left-hand border's many links to go to the obvious places, such as the calendar of upcoming events, or to find the results for any event held in the years since I started collecting them in 1999. Also, if you haven't tried it, check the Table of Contents link to scroll through a summary of many of the pages on the site, all 4000+ of them.

You can also use the NArchival Archery logo and the FITA logo at the top to jump to those websites. Want to join discussions going on about various AA, JOAD, and general archery topics, then use the window of topic summaries with recent postings to JUMP IN! No registration required!

Want to search for pictures of yourself or your kid? Use the GOOGLE search at the bottom of the page to begin the search. NOTE that you can use the check box to change the search to use either the NArchival Archery website or the entire web. Many pictures are not "named" with an archer's name, unfortunately, so out of the 7,000 or so pictures on the Archival Archery site, you might have to use the photograph index to start with the event itself, and then use the thumbnail page to quickly scan through them.

Use the link at the bottom of the page if you want to "search a different way" - you get to choose which engine your key word search terms get submitted to. This can get you some unusual results not found with Google, Alta Vista or Yahoo.

While you are at the bottom of the page, you can use various hyperlinks sprinkled down there to view past "what's new" items, FUN PHOTOs (which has photos of interest as well), explanations of common abbreviations (RBG, AFAIK, and HTH stuff), all sorts of things.

Finally, if you have folks from out of town that are headed to A and want to show them a good time, or if you have kids that need some more "Texan eddification", then use the waving A flag at the top to go to the best source of A Information in the state, the Bob Bullock A State History Museum in Austin.

You Think You Have Trouble Finding The Gold?
Tom Barker has once again found a very interesting website.This one shows how archers can shoot gold with their eyes closed. Well, actually, they are visually impaired (blind) archers, so it is a little different, but the dedication and effort it takes for them is impressive.
The Saint Dunstan's Archery Club is in the English sense a newcomer, since many English clubs are literally hundreds of years old. St. Dunstan's Archery Club was founded in 1975 and is situated in a lovely spot overlooking the sea, at Ovingdean East of Brighton. It supports ex-servicemen and women who have become blind. They refer to their sport as Visually Impaired Archery (VIA), which is less likely to stimulate panic in the public than "blind archery".
The tools they use for assisting in orientation of the bow and their stance look very much like something that sighted archers could well use to improve their own stance and form. For more information and a pleasant few minutes of browsing, go to the main website for these dedicated archers who choose NOT to lessen their aims in life. Be sure to click on the pictures link there.

For additional information and ideas about involving VI people in the sport of archery, the British Blind Sport website which has been on our links page for some time has a lot of good information and methods. Thanks, Tom, for the tip. Send YOUR tips on great websites relating to archery to the webmaster, please! For other neat and unusual links that have been my "link of the month" selections, use this hyperlink to jump to the Archery Links page

If neither of these sites whets your appetite for knowledge, then the ULTIMATE physics of archery website has to be that of Joe Tapley. Joe has written and re-worked time and again his pages, addressing anything and everything you might want to know about concerning archery. I agree with what he writes that I can understand, with the exception of "Archer's Paradox". He describes the "why" in great mechanical detail with easy to follow diagrams, but fails to define the "what". For the "what", see this document on the Archival Archery website. And for the best photographs I have ever seen of the acceleration and behavior of the arrow, some folks in Sweden now have the X Shot photographically speaking (and a pretty neat looking bow as well).