UK Student Archery Association

So long, and thanks for all the discs [29/Mar/25]

Now and again, an editorial carries a little more personal weight for the Editor - this is definitely one of those.

BUTC 2025 happens tomorrow and there will be some new faces involved and not just Manchester and Northampton making their tournament debuts. As we confirmed at BUTC last year, Ian McGibbon and Stewart Barclay (Hello!) have both stepped back from the day to day (year to year?) running of BUTC. Ian was tournament organiser for virtaully all the BUTCs from 2003 to 2024, and also led the ACME organising crew that organised the BUSA/BUCS Championships from 2001 to around 2009. Ian's contribution to the student archery landscape cannot be overstated, raising the bar for how the national student tournaments were run. He was also previously involved with the clubs at Dundee and Imperial.

The central BUTC organising crew has changed in number and personnel almost every year and it has always been a pleasure to welcome new talent to this side of the fence. Twenty (20!) BUTCs is a nice round number for Ian and Stewart (Hello again!) to sign off at, but it's also a lifetime. The first BUTC took place on 1st March 2003 and if BUTC were a person, it would now easily be old enough to have graduated from university. So, for the 21st BUTC, it's time to hand over the lists and the microphone to some new faces. Kian Eshraghi-Yazdi has put together a central team to run this year's event in Exeter, with Luke Burch co-ordinating the Exeter end.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of the BUTC experience so far. BUTC has always put the emphasis on the team rather than the individual, however, special thanks are due to long-term sponsors, especially Graham Harris at Clickers and Andreas Lorenz and the late Werner Beiter, plus the event's original creator Tim Mundon. OK, I will mention a couple of long term BUTC helpers: James Raybould, Samantha Hewkin, Michael Ward, Matt Nowicki, Tom and Vickie Duncan, Erik Rowbotham and Margaux Mesle. And that's before we get into all our other helpers, host clubs, competitors (be they multiple champions or one-time first round exit-ees) and indeed to all the people who intentionally or unintentionally got roped in to the madness.

To borrow from the BUTC 2024 review, BUTC was always supposed to give students a flavour of international competition and we/the current (well, now former!) central organising team think it has done that. It is our hope that those cheeky little yellow discs continue to shine on, far into the future.

May those discs be ever in your favour.