UK Student Archery Association

Mixing it up [17/Jul/14]

Big news for 2015 is that BUCS Championships are changing the format of the senior team category. This has always previously been a mixed team of 4 event. There will now be separate men's and women's team of 3 events, running in parallel. Significantly, the same set of BUCS points currently available for the mixed teams will be available for both men's and women's teams. This works out to a substantial increase in the number of points available for archery in general.

BUCS have made the change in order to help boost female participation levels in the sport. Amongst the top eight teams at this years BUCS Outdoors there were 5 women and 27 men - the comparable figures for the BUCS Indoors 2014 are identical. On top of promoting a bit more gender equality, the increase in points should increase the standard of ladies recurve (certainly if an equivalent increase for barebow is anything to go by) and also means there are more points available full stop for archery. BUCS have done a good thing.

On the Sunday after BUCS, a H2H round was run for the second time. In qualifying there were four new All Unis records set as follows:

Recurve Kieran Slater (Leicester) 645
Barebow Jennifer Mankin (Edinburgh) 463
Longbow Luke Rieman (Warwick) 271 and Emily Williams (South Wales) 126

Slater, Mankin and Rieman all claimed their second All Unis record of the weekend. There were 105 gent recurves, 48 lady recurves, 5 longbows (separated out this year), 26 barebows and 17 compounds, a field of 201 up from 159 and a measure of the success of the event last year.

Kieran Slater won the gents recurve event, beating 15th seed Alex Morrell (Birmingham) in the final. Morrell beat both 2nd seed Alexander Smith (Oxford) and 6th seed Tak Ho (Cambridge) on his way to the final. 4th ranked Richard Haydock (Nottingham) beat Ho in the bronze medal match. In the women's event 6th seed Nata Chavanich (Southampton) beat Hannah Beasley-Suffolk (Imperial), who was seeded top and newly crowned BUCS Outdoor champion. Chavanich beat 3rd seed Madeleine Meatyard (Warwick), then second seed Charlie Birch (Oxford). Birch lost in the bronze medal match to Amelie Aichinger (Surrey) who qualified fourth.

Matthew Dale (Warwick) beat Thomas Taylor (Coventry) in the compound final, whilst Hope Greenwood (Edinburgh) pipped top qualifier Billy Gao (Birmingham) to bronze. Huw Vaughan-Jackson beat Jennifer Mankin (both Edinburgh) in the barebow final and with longbow being held as a separate category this year, Luke Rieman (Warwick) beat Edward Pike (Edinburgh) in this final.

Apologies to everyone, it seems as though I wrote the review for regular BUCS Outdoors and then forgot to actually publish it, but here is the BUCS Outdoors 2014 review. Those interested in hosting BUCS Indoors, that will take place on Sat 7th Feb in 2015. There is not confirmed date for BUTC, but it will probably be 2 or 3 weeks later.

Further afield, the World Uni Championships were held in Legnica, Poland. A postcard from Amyce Aurora-Smith tells the full story, but the big success was in the men's recurve team event where Ashe Morgan, Kieran Slater and George Harding, seeded 10th overcame Slovenia (7th) and Mexico (2nd) before succumbing to Italy in the semi-finals. The team went on to win the bronze match against the mighty Koreans (1st) who had been edged out themselves in the other semi by eventual winners Chinese Taipei, see more from the Internationals section.