It has been a while since my last blog, mostly owing to work and not finding any spare time for the blog updates. However, things have been busy at AoR.
The move indoors has lead to some busy sessions, but with everyone helping and observing the line rules the transition has been a good one and I thank every AoR member and visitor for doing there part in making these sessions as fun and rewarding as they are.
Talking about fun and rewarding, yesterday was both of those for a number of people.
Shooting a Portsmouth scoring round Imogen Neville (Recurve 475) and Amber Wilkins (Recurve 499) both shot personal bests. Ruby Paul (Recurve 479) and Mike Williams (Longbow 282) both shot personal bests and set ne AoR club records at the same time. Congratulations to you all.
During the session, several people spoke to me about a head to head, just for a little fun. Me being me, jumped in with both feet and we rather too hastily put a quick head to head together at the end of the session. I learned some valuable lessons, messed up the order once and came away with a much better idea of how we can handle this in the future. Unlike normal head to heads where the system winds up with the top two archers fighting for the final positions and the win, I chose to take the top two and put those against each other. This smoothed the transition from round to round and (I think) gave everyone a little more of a chance.
The final ended up with Stuart (Compound) vs Imogen (Recurve). Being the sportsman that he is, Stuart bumped over to shoot a one arrow shoot-off with Imogen on a Recurve Portsmouth face. The hall when silent and Imogen took her aim and landed one straight in the nine at 9 o’clock. As Stuart took aim there was a little heckling from behind the line and he shot just a fraction outside of Imogen to take second place.
So, first impromptu Sunday head to head to Imogen with Stuart a very close second place. Best of all, everyone appeared to enjoy the extra fun session at the end of a serious scoring round and I hope to run a better head to head this coming Sunday.