UK Student Archery Association

New stories in NEUAL opener [09/Dec/24]

NEUAL match 1 has published results in full. This match was cut into four slices, spread across weekends in late October and mid November. Lancaster won and Bangor made their NEUAL debut.

Winning the match by nearly 80 points, Lancaster racked up 2245 to take maximum points in the match. Constantinos Charalambous scored 579 for the Red Roses, with Kobe Pioquinto just a point behind and Jesse Phillips adding 560. Behind the leaders, only 43 points split second place from fifth. Manchester took second ahead of Keele 2167 to 2160. That was despite Will Addison (Keele) being the top scorer in the match on 587, and Will Oakes (Keele) adding 578. Rafail Panagiotidis (Manchester) scored 572. Fourth spot went to Liverpool's 2143, with defending champions Sheffield in fifth on 2124. Kian Eshraghi-Yazdi (Sheffield) scored exactly 570. Samson Wang (Leeds) scored 579 for his side - albeit Leeds were over 100 points adrift in sixth.

This match saw Bangor make their NEUAL debut - theoretically they are moving from SWWU, but in six competitive seasons, Bangor have only ever shot at one SWWU match that wasn't also a BUCS regional qualifier. Shorter travel times to places like Liverpool and Manchester (as against Cardiff and Swansea) will hopefully see Bangor contest a full regional league campaign for the first time. In this match, the first ever Welsh club in NEUAL scored 1939 and took a respectable 7th spot out of the 15 competing sides. Bangor were led home by Sienna Foster's 558.

Lancaster's win was their first at an all NEUAL match since they won both NEUAL Indoor (and Outdoor) Championships in 2017 - although it's worth noting that NEUAL was the last of the leagues to move to an all vs all format, post-Covid, in 2021/22. This is the first NEUAL fixture to be won by someone other than Leeds or Sheffield since November 2021. Keele's third spot is their best since the BUCS Indoors qualifying NEUAL leg in February 2020. For Manchester, the arithmetic is much simpler - second place is the their best single match result in NEUAL ever. Elsewhere, having been on the edge of collapse in the summer, Bradford did field a squad in this match.

Only seven clubs fielded novices and it was York who grabbed top spot on 1182. Sheffield were second, but were well back on 1001. Top individual novice was Abir Al-Ansari (Liverpool) on 413.

In the the NEUAL Unsighted match, Manchester claimed a very comfortable win, scoring 1540, nearly 200 ahead. Similar to the recurve match, second to fifth place was very closely fought. York scored 1353 in second. UCLan were just 1 ahead of Sheffield who were 4 ahead of Liverpool, the three teams on 1333, 1332 and 1328. Top scorers were Daniel Kilgallon (UCLan) on 545 followed by Wenze Jiang (Manchester) on 534.

See the updated tables on the NEUAL 2024/25 page.