NI Archery Society - Senior Indoor Target Championships 2010

This was the first main competition of the new decade and was hosted and organised by the Society to give archers from the 33 clubs in Northern Ireland the opportunity to compete against each other for the top annual awards.

There are over 700 affiliated archers in the society who participate in the sport in different ways and for different reasons i.e. for some archers this is their main sport and they attain representative honours at GB and NI level, for other archers it is a sport (similar to golf) where they wish only to do better than they did before and for some archers it is an opportunity to meet with others to enjoy a common sporting pastime. Other participants prefer to be judges, coaches or managers.

The standard at the championships was of the highest level with members of the NI squad also participating in the different categories which included shooting with longbow, recurve and compound bows in a FITA 18 format. The targets were placed at 18 metres from the shooting line and consisted of vertical 3-spot faces for recurve and compound archers and 40cm diameter faces for longbow archers. A qualifying round of 5 dozen arrows were shot to determine the head to head seedings for the elimination and final rounds were archers were ‘paired’ off to shoot against each other in a knock out competition. Finally the last two archers shot against each other in a tense head to head standoff with only a few points difference deciding the overall winners of the awards. For some this was their first taste of victory, for others it was to confirm their superiority and unfortunately for some it was not to be their day.

Northern Ireland Archery Society would like to thank all those who helped in organising the event and if you are interested in ‘having a go’ at archery in 2010 why not contact a local club by referring to the website www.niarchery.co.uk