The 123rd National Target Championship of the National Archery Association, nee USA Archery, is being held at the time of this writing in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with official practice starting today, Monday August 6, 2007. A great time was had by most, although this one guy chose to have his upper limb delaminate at full draw. Gnarly sound but at first blush everything looks normal. It's amazing what an odd, unexpected sound can do to a crowd of archers on the line. Why whiplash wasn't diagnosed in a dozen heads that immediately pivoted to the sound is a mystery to me.
It's great to see all the archers again, folks you run into at tournaments, and occasionally in "real life". There are some great folks in this sport, but it is a shame that there aren't more big shoots to get together at.
As with the unofficial practice yesterday, and the plain 'ol ordinary day on Saturday, a beautiful shiny morning gave way to a late afternoon thunderstorm complete with a deluge of cold raindrops, inundating everything. I'm told by the para archers who have been "encamped" at the OTC for the last week or so that this has happened every single day.
The venue is like, totally sogged - a green, lush, squishy morain. The grass is growing like a weed, and is thicker and longer than in any previous year. I'm thinking that stores are probably selling more metal detectors than any year previous as archers realize their arrows are just plain disappearing into the sodding sod during practice ends, never to show their vanes or crestings. Photo Index
Yesterday the grass was green. Today, the aisles have been defined by the many popup tents sprouting into the field, thereby limiting the options for the folks walking about, and the traffic of tromping feet have pounded the grass into the mud. Brown muck is on the radar for the rest of the week.
Aside from the muck rising up from the crushed blades, the conditions couldn't be better for shooting. Blue sky and searing sun rays, changing into overcast clouds around noonish, but the winds never got obnoxious.
Did I mention the photos yet? Ok, yes, there are photos from the unofficial practice, from the official practice, from the traditional tournament, as well as from the clout tournament this afternoon. More than 500 photos so far! Yikes! Photo Index. <hint> Notice that there are photos from previous years as well? enjoy. Add comments if you want - add the names of the archers if you can - this would be appreciated in the years to come. They will be up there like, forever....
No results yet. Go figger, they don't keep score at the official practice! They will be posted when available.
btw - when viewing the photos note that you can control the images by clicking on the left and right sides, top and bottom of the photo. HOVER for screen tips on this. You can also right-click and choose to download a copy of the image to your computer. HOW COOL IS THAT?? Suitable for printing up to 12 or 14 inches wide with reasonable resolution! (7 megapixels in most cases)
Once you have viewed all of the images in a particular archer's (ie, YOU) shotcycle, you can then use the left and right arrow keys to quickly cycle through the shots.
It's Tuesday morning, first day of competition. The event is supposed to be a single-line shoot this year - either a bunch of targets have been added, or else the numbers are down to the point where everyone can be crowded onto the line at the same time. Regardless, things should go much faster! Since the rain pattern is such that the drops start around 3 to 4, perhaps we will all be clear of the field by drip-time.
The morning line will consist of the Female Compounds and the Male Recurves, so I am off to the field for photos...
and flash! I am back. The field is not as bad as one would expect, given the torrents of rain that fell yesterday PM (and the day before, and the day before....) . The sky is cloudy enough that the heat rays that were burning in yesterday morning are not a factor, and there is only the slightest hint of breeze with reasonable temperatures so the conditions are excellent for shooting. There should be some personal bests as well as official records from this day. The line is pretty crowded - the single line of shooting means that there are three archers per target butt, squeezing in where there usually would be only two with their scopes. I saw a lot of smiles though, most people are having a good time - it is a good thing that "prune toes" don't hurt! :)
Uploading more pictures from the AM line asap. Photo Index
Well, darn. I started a 300-photograph upload and went to the field for the afternoon shoot with Lindsey. The software got to the point of actually uploading (after comparing a few thousand files on the laptop against the website) and stopped to ask me, "are you sure?", so nothing (argh) got uploaded this morning till I got back to the hotel. One click, and the upload FINALLY started. It will be done shortly because I am in the hotel room closest to the WiFi antenna in the hotel (woo hoo!), and hopefully by that time I will have the hundreds of photos from the PM shoot ready to start uploading. I *hate* windows. I want my DOS 3.1 I want my OS/2 WARP.... (geeks and techies will relate to that - the rest of you, just sympathiZE with pathetically sad whiner)
The afternoon shoot was very nice, a little more wind from directly behind the archers, and times with bare sun and other times with clouds - sunscreen was definitely a good idea. NO RAIN! woo hoo once more! The field is not bad at all, and if the gawds of weather will just give us another day with no rain the field will be much much better - no more soggy sandals..and my prune toes will be a fond memory....
There are a lot of new faces, and a lot of missing old faces - sure wish there were more old timers/repeat offenders here! Their absence allows the 3 per target single line shooting, which is pretty neat but greatly reduces the social nature of sitting around and jest plain visitin' between arrer flingin'. There is always a good with a bad, IMHO (In My Humble Opinion). For more acronyms frequent in the net, check the bottom of the main page of the Archival Archery website.
Lindsey took my camera away at the end of the day and started getting some great candid (and posed) shots of some very good peoples... They will be at the end of the PM shooting line's photos. I cancelled the AM upload so that I could piggyback the PM photos onto the post, and that means that there will be more than 500 photos for you to view. Hope you are a die-hard archer fan! You will probably notice that I have a slight bias towards the TEXAS archers when it comes to not deleting extra photos - I also tend to retain more of the shot sequence of the elite archers (elite is a very positive word, by the way) - So to save the feelings of us mortals, I don't retain the follow-through frames that show the archer picking his ear on follow through, or flagging the cab motions, that kind of stuff.
No point in
showing gawd-awful stuff, just the fun and amusing stuff, and the examples of
excellence. And I will be the first to admit that I don't always keep JUST
the excellence. Ahem, my daughter is sitting in the bed next to me, icing
her back and shoulder, and she turns on the BLOW DRYER to warm her toes under
the covers. Ah, such is the sport of archery - ice and fire. Ayy Yay
Yay, she says, as the coldth sinks into her shoulder...and she shoots me this
evil (eeee-villll) look for photo-ing her)
More tomorrow morning, fellow sagittarial enthusiasts....
The sky is clear as the sun is coming up, right around 6:30 am, so sun screen is definitely called for! Photos will be light since this is the shorter distance/3-arrow, 2 minute ends - hard to get anywhere to shoot photos. The weather estimation is for 10% chance of getting rained on, winds 5 to 10 mph, and a high of 87. (not too bad if you are a Texan, dang hot fer some others though...)
JOAD photos will be shot tomorrow morning, I hope....
In the meantime the morning line of female recurves and male compounders shot the two shorter distances - 50 meter and 30 meter - and conditions were close to perfect. A hint more breeze at times that was absolutely necessary, but otherwise not a discouraging word was heard.
If conditions are like this for the rest of the week then scores will be even better than those of the last two days. And it will be nice to not have the ground smell, well, ummm, like the bottom of the lake that recently drained out of my garage. :)
I'm culling and editing the photos from this morning, few though they are, and will have them up asap. Gary Holstein has graciously offered to provide some of the photos that he has shot. I will upload them to the website just as soon as they are available and put a notice out, because he is an excellent photographer and I'm eager to see his work!
I'm going to walk out on a limb a little and suggest that we are reaping the benefits ALREADY of the BEST approach.
Looking through the photos of the archers, and especially as I watch through the viewfinder of my camera, seeing them go through their drawing motions while I wait to snap the "release shots", I see the influence of Kisik Lee in many of our best young archers. I was talking it over with another High Performance Coach a day ago, and we both felt that it was surprising how well in general many of the RAs and other young archers are doing, so soon after moving into a completely new form/method.
That said, I also am a bit surprised as I go down the Junior line, just how many ARE NOT attempting to adopt true bone alignment nor utilization of LAN2 in drawing their bows, nor relaxing their release instead of "sproinging" their string hand out to loose the arrow, for example. There are a lot of coaches out there that are NOT keeping the BEST in mind for their archers, sad to say. BUT perhaps some will see how well the young BEST archers are scoring and put 2 and 2 together for their own students' sake. I am betting that the results from today will show a more competitive set of scores (internationally speaking).
A few days ago I kind of shared a couple of blank bales over at the practice range with a young archer and her coach - she was having an acute attack of string slap. What I heard was so easy to cure or eliminate if she was being taught the BEST method, but instead the solution was duct tape and essentially "don't get into such good alignment, keep a larger triangle" advice. Etiquette notwithstanding, in hindsight I think I might actually take the coach aside next time and make some quiet suggestions. At the time, I couldn't envision interfering like that. But I did no one a favor by my reluctance to risk offense.
It's about 4:15pm here in COS and the upload of the morning's photos just completed. I was told today that the event will be held (at least) once more here in COS next year. In the past, the National Target has rotated to points around the country every few years. COS is pretty much smack dab in the middle of the country (contiguous 47 states, not counting Maine <G>) so it has been fairly "fair" for imposing the same travel demands, although some folks argue that the event needs to be more centered based on the membership distribution rather than the geophysical middle. Not sure, but I think that would mean that it would need to move to California or A (woo hoo) to be closes to the highest number of archers.... (I am now, grinning, running, and ducking for cover due to the slings and arrows headed my way by all the good archers in the northeast, the east, the southeast, etc...)
A note on the first day's results that were posted on the USA Archery website on the first day. That is pretty good, considering all the key work that has to be done to enter those scores....but what is really impressive is that the file timestamp was 5:16PM! Now that is some good performance, by I suspect, Marihelen Rogers. Thanks, Marihelen!
Well, there are a couple of typos in the address for the results for Day 2 - the Total for the 2-day FITA - so I am saving a copy to this location, if you want to see what the scores are....
And I have to point out that the 1357 shot by Brady Ellison is a very clear indicator of what the BEST method can do. Brady switched from compound to recurve in order to pursue olympic dreams, and he makes shooting a 50+ pound recurve bow look downright easy. And his bow is incredibly quiet. eerie....but I look for him to exceed that score with the two upcoming days - the forecast is for more, drier, better conditions. And now that he is used to the venue and warmed up.....the odds are good! and here are some shots from the unofficial practice day. Enjoy.
It occurred to me just now that perhaps, after reading my glowing praise/prose (yeh, right) and seeing the photos, some are wondering WHY they didn't jump into this year's event. What else did they miss besides some great shooting, a recharge of the proverbial batteries, a gaining of fellowship, better arrow flinging that you would believe, yadda yadda. How about some great sight-seeing? I drove out to the Garden Of The Gods, a mere 8 minutes from the hotel, and got to see some stunning "rocks". I took along Lindsey (who had seen them before when I dragged "the teenager" kicking and semi-sulking (oh, dad, rocks???) to them several years ago, as well as Lori Dupree, a para archer of only 6 months' experience who is as cynical as they come ("oh boy, we're going to see some rocks, hold me back..." ). After only a short time of cruising around at 10 mph with the windows down amongst the shards of dinosaur teeth-like red and white spires of rock rising up from the hillside they both were oohing and ahhing just like (I suspect) the Taipei contingent of archers we ran into in the park headquarters' souvenir shop. Chatchki aside, all had a good time despite themselves. Here is a link to a few photos of yet something else that YOU ARE MISSING BY NOT SHOOTING AT THE NATS THIS YEAR!
One last hint - when you load a page full of thumbnail, notice that if you hit the spacebar, it starts an AUTO-PLAY slideshow of all of the photos in that folder. Good for when you are well, kinda working but not totally engrossed in what you should be doing!
More tomorrow...The "real" FITA begins for all the archers...
The environment couldn't be better for shooting excellence on this, the third day of competition. The ground dried out enough for them to sneak out with a mower and shorten the grass overnight, even collecting most of the clippings. They also were careful to mow crossways, so that there were no impressions/lines in the grass running from the shooting line towards the targets to throw the archers' perceptions off. Good stuff! Shooting a single line sure does make the process move faster, but have overheard several conversations about how the socializing has been impaired :)
The tradition for the National Targets is to re-assign everyone for the second FITA, based on their scores from the first FITA. There are several reasons I can think of for this, the most likely reason is to promote excellence by inducing peer pressure. Archers are competitive, so shooting against someone at your level, on your target, makes you want to do "just a leetle bit better" than the target mates. That's the most likely reason, but perhaps it is just to shake people up a little, to help people meet new friends when they arrive on a new target. Regardless, that is what happened today. It makes things a little more challenging.
One thing I have NOT heard is anyone wishing for a little rain to cool things off!
Best News!: Gary Holstein has provided (for uploading to the USA ARCHERY RECORDS WEBSITE) a number of excellent photos that he has taken during the week's events. A link to all of these great photos can be found (as soon as the humongous upload of files is done) on the master index page for the events. Thanks Gary, and please be sure to send him a note!
The general meeting is set for tonite at the Olympic Training Center and will probably be a very interesting meeting that will not lack for drama. I'll try to take some notes :) In the meantime, all of Gary's photos and the few that I took today are uploading.
Guy Gerig just walked by the hotel window, which reminds me - did I mention
he's shooting in a KILT?
He says it gives him a certain freedom...
It is 9:30PM Thursday nite and I have just returned from the Annual general
meeting that is held by the board of governors during the Target Championship.
This is the only BOG meeting where the rank and file are allowed to attend, to
ask questions, and to learn of the functioning of the organization's board of
governors. I am disappointed to say that there were ONLY some 70 people in
the ranks, plus 9 at the head table. The turnout is indicative of
something, I am sure. BOG member Lloyd Brown was absent, having been
recently deposed as President by the other members. BOG Members Alan Rasor
and David Cousins have both resigned within the last day or so and were absent.
Just as last year, there was no treasurer statement presented delineating the
financial situation of the organization - In fact there were only three pieces
of paper handed out, a very terse set of minutes from 2006 and an agenda of with
8 lines of items. If you want to know more, ask your board member
representative - at least, that is what they have told me everyone should do. Do
NOT expect them to reach out to you, they have repeatedly shown that it is not
in them to do so.
Back to photos tomorrow morning - I will take the dawn patrol over to the Youth field and hopefully get some photos of our up and coming archers!
Uploading photos from the youth field and the crossbow archers, and running to the field for the PM shoot. Looks HOT today.
Well the upload completed. Hopefully managed to cover YOUR kid :), if not my apologies. When they are shooting 3-arrow ends it is hard to catch more than one or two archers' executions per end and still compose a decent frame.
The afternoon shooting had large rain drops at time, but never enough to get anything truly wet, just really humidified. Sun wasn't too hard on us thanks to lots of "partly cloudy", and there were anvil head thunderboomers all around to give great cloud formations. The rain at times was white above us, evaporating before it could fall down to us - kinda unique and a quality of high altitude/low humidity.
The PM shoot of female recurves and male compounders went smoothly, not too many equipment failures to delay things. Lindsey caught a toe on a bowstand on the way to the shooting line during the last distance, fell and broke..........her stabilizer's doinker. Nothing else. WOO HOO!
Anytime she takes a header I wonder if we will be calling careflight (again), but the soft muddy field and her stabilizer kinda broke her fall and so she didn't break anything important, just bruised a knee & leg, and maybe ego a leetle. Got up, took a few minutes, and then shot three makeup arrows, all 8s. She said the wind came up and caught her off guard or they would have been gold :). At this point the kid is on two bags of ice, or rather under two bags of ice and a double dose of naproxen right now. lucky is lucky!
I would be remiss, well, heck, I have been remiss, in not giving a public mention to David Taggart of Clearwater, Kansas. His daughter Angela is a good friend of, and has shot with, Lindsey in years past, he is a good archer in his own right, but I and many, many other archers owe Dave a debt of gratitude for the many arrows he has located with his ultra-effective metal detector. He's found arrows for us at too many venues to count! When everyone else has gone back to the motel, Dave is out sweeping the field, working of a list of "can you find...", finding the arrows that no one else can. When an arrow is worth $10, or $30, or even more, his expertise is very under-mentioned and under-acknowledged, as well as UNDERVALUED. If everyone who he has found an arrow for were to give him a $5 tip, he'd be able to fly first class from Kansas to well, Colorado!
Thank you, Dave, for your kind efforts. oh, uh, can you see if you can find that X10 with yellow spinwings someone I know lost on target 48, between 60 and 70 meters? Thanks very much.... If you see Dave, be sure to thank him for his gift to so many archers.
I'm off to a paralympic meeting for prepping for the IPC world championships in Korea next month - Randi Smith is the team leader and head coach for the Para Team, and Lindsey will be fighting for a slot for Beijing. More photos to upload later as well.
Photos are uploading from today, they mainly are of the para team shooters, and a few non-shooting photos. I've had some people comment about the tendency I have to show archers at "the moment of truth" and how they appear the same. They may actually be somewhat boring if you don't know the person, but my goal is and has been to provide something of use and interest to the archer who is being photographed, to the friends and family members who are unable to attend in person, and to the coaches of the archer who can see nuances of technique under pressure that the archer might not display during practice. And when it comes to the kids - it is neat to see them from year to year, growing in ability and stature, and to look back and see where they have come from. I also envision that these photos will be here forever as a record. In addition the photos I have taken are under a fair use,non-commercial copyright. In other words I intend for you to download the images you wish to keep on your screensaver, or to print, or to give to uncle Bob or sis, or dad, whomsoever, AS LONG AS IT IS NOT A COMMERCIAL ENDEAVOUR - for commercial reprints, prior permission is still required (and is likely).
So yes, they are not always going to be unique and different in the way of being able to vary the subject matter - it is what it is: archery. Enjoy it for what it is. A great sport that is expressed in as many ways as there are archers to pull a bow.
It's Saturday morning and they just posted the FITA totals for the 4 days of shooting. The main page of the Archival Archery website lists those Texans I could find in quick scan, before heading to the field for the OR rounds of the US Open. more later, of course...
Back from the OR rounds for recurve archers -- once again the conditions were great, though the wind came up by the 1/8 - Ed Eliasson had a good day, tieing the record of 118 for a 12 arrow match. Ed is on the positive side of 70 years old, obviously. :)
Working through the photos from the morning's OR shooting at this point, will upload prior to the OR finals at 4pm....
Ok, will start the upload of the final sets of photos from the OR Medal Matches. In case you haven't yet heard:
Gold Medal Matches:
Compound:
Dave Cousins 111
Steve Gatto 112
Jamie VanNatta 107
Erika Anshutz 114
Gold Medal Matches:
Recurve:
Brady Ellison 9, 9, 9, 9, X, X, 9, 10, 10, X, X, 8 = 113
Butch Johnson 10, 10, 7, 9, 10, 10, 10, 9, 9, X, 9, 8 = 111
Khatuna Lorig 9, X, 9, 7, 9, 9, X, 9, 9, 9, 8, 9 = 107
Lindsay Pian 6, 10, 10, 8, 9, 8, 9, 8, 9, 10, 9, 9 = 105
Bronze medalists
Mens Recurve - Tyler Domenech , Jsaon Mckittrick 4th
Mens Compound - Logan Wilde , Rodger Willet 4th
Womens Compound - Sally Siepp, Brittany Lorrenti 4th
Womens Recurve - Jenny Nichols, Karen Scavotto 4th (2nd 1-arrow shootoff 10-8)
The banquet went off just as smoothly as the entire event this week has. For the record, given the short-handed nature of the NArchival Archery offices, they did an outstanding job with coordinating this event. Everyone stepped in, stepped up, pitched in, and helped to bring it all together. There are a huge number of records to be documented and certificates sent out, so be sure to send in your claim forms (fill them out online and then print them, please) - I look forward to processing every one of them!
You will notice there are a huge number of shots of each archer's execution during the medal matches and even during much of the OR matches that I have posted. If you load them all, browse back and forth with the left/right arrow keys on your keyboard, you will get a great step-by-step extraction of their shot release followthrough, kind of like an oldfashioned nickelodeon, or a new high tech stop action feature. Either way you look at it, should be interesting viewing! It has been observed by Bill Body that 2 out of 3 top finishers in both male and female recurves are a product of Kisik Lee's mentoring - and many more are in the upper echelons of the finishers. Kisik has told me that one of the surprising things for him, in coming to the US and taking on the complete building of his program, is how fast Americans were "getting" his philosophy and method. Hardly more than a year and a half after he "tore down their shooting form" and started rebuilding it all from scratch, we are witnessing the rebirth of international competitiveness among American archers - the attainment of > 1330 FITA scores, for example.
I'm not saying we don't and haven't had good archers to represent us/US but we definitely have a "whole new group" to look to for being able to up the ante when it comes time to shoot abroad. To those that supported Coach Lee, and wanted Coach Lee, and GOT Coach Lee, we owe a hearty handshake and a slap on the back in gratitude for their wisdom and vision. To all the regional High Performance Coaches I have to say, redouble your efforts for 2012's crop of shooters are among you now, just waiting to be taught the BEST way.
I'm gettin up before sunrise in order to drive up Pikes' Peak, but right now, 10:28, we are getting POUNDED by driving winds and rain and thunder - water is coming in under the door! Sure glad Lindsey isn't shooting tomorrow morning, and also that Tom Green got everything down that he wanted down such as the tents, cause if he didn't they fer sure are down now, but in twisted heaps. Wow, what a storm!
I hope this bloggish thing was of some use to you and not too boring. Thanks for all of the comments, compliments, etc...which were very much appreciated...Hope to do it again some time!
Ron Carmichael, Colorado Springs, CO, 22:31hrs, 8/11/2007
PS: more photos to upload overnight, so check back in the AM.