UK Student Archery Association

Sharp Contrasts in SSS [16/Feb/18]

Edinburgh won their second match of the SSS season in match 4 (27th Jan) to open up a one point advantage over St Andrews, who were second. Meanwhile, Napier, who were runners up last season face serious financial issues.

St Andrews, who have never finished higher than 4th in SSS since 2002, are all but guaranteed second place overall in the table, but would need to beat Edinburgh by 2 places or a cool 200 points in match 5. Dundee were third in the match, but were only just over 2000, with the middle third of the teams all in the 1900s. Strathclyde were fourth in the match and look most likely to finish third overall for the third time in four seasons. In the novice match Edinburgh powered to first spot with 1530. Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde were second and third in the match, but at intervals of roughly 100 points behind. Strathclyde look like they will finish second in the novice table. Edinburgh won again in SSS' experimental compound league.

Joanna Meyer (Edinburgh) was top scorer in the match with 568, whilst there were also low 560s from Douglas Jardine (Borders) and Andrew Smith (Napier). Robin Burton and Petr Manas (both Edinburgh) were the top novices on 523 and 522.

See the current SSS 2017/18 tables. SSS League Match 5 will be on 17th Feb. SSS Indoors was originally scheduled to be a third regional BUCS Indoors Qualifying event. That fell through and the Scottish clubs will now be required to travel to Preston, with SSS Indoors itself forced out to 7th April in St Andrews.

At this point, the Editor must declare a certain level of personal involvement with Napier's club.

Napier have been runners up in SSS senior table 5 times in the last 12 years, including last season. For several years running now their Students Association has provided no funding to the club, despite them being 25% of the membership fee. Nor do they provide them with their own training facilities, in fact Napier are not allowed to use their own university's sports hall (more on that below) so must hire external facilities. This swallows the bulk of their budget and leaves little for equipment or travel. A smaller than usual intake in 2017/18 left the club forced to cancel practice sessions to save money. In the last couple of weeks, Napier's Students Association cancelled all remaining sessions because of incorrectly calculated financial projections. NUAC's existing good relationship with the venue meant this was easy to rectify, even though the first intended cancellation was only hours away.

Napier University's own sports facilities have been off limits to archery since they were built roughly 10 years ago. The size of 8 badminton or 2 basketball courts, they would be a perfectly standard archery venue. The archery club of the time were asked for design input and thus the netting that divides up the sports hall is full on backstop netting. It has seen no arrows in a decade however, as archery was deemed too dangerous. The most recent reason supplied was that archery might damage the underfloor heating. Incredibly, it has now come to light that a rifle club use the facilities.

Napier have secured enough funding for hall time to see out this indoor season, but the club do have a BT MyDonate page, to which all UKSAA readers are encouraged to donate.

Spare a thought too for MMU Cheshire. Manchester Metropolitan University is closing the Cheshire campus in summer 2019 and MMU Cheshire have been unable to take part in any NEUAL Western Conference fixtures. However, they do hope to complete in the NEUAL Championship events, but face an extremely uncertain future through no fault of their own.