It could be said that Archery is one of the most overlooked sports at the University, but this should not be the case, especially since it is a club that wins on a regular basis. Here we take a look back over the club’s successful season and celebrate the medals its competitors have brought home to Lancaster.
Over this term, the Archery Club has competed seven times. First came the Novice Championship which saw the Novice Team reach a very respectable fourth place out of eight. For a group that have only been shooting since the start of this academic year, this not only proves how good they are, but also how successful the club has been at training.
The next competition was the first North England Universities Archery League (NEUAL) match against York and Northumbria, with Lancaster archers Kevin Toutain and Mathew Smith taking second and third place. This is even more impressive when the fact that first place went to a club who had far more training time than the Lancaster team are allowed.
The women’s team also competed at this event and Lancaster came away with the top five positions in the Ladies Recurve, with Sally Morris, Frances Bolton-King and Jazz Perry leading the way.
The other NEUAL competitions involved the tough opposition of Liverpool and Sunderland, in which Lancaster’s senior team stormed their way into first place, with Kevin Toutain taking an impressive first place and Mathew Smith using his precision to score himself second individually.
The threatening threesome of Toutain, Smith and Matt McCormack again stole the show taking the top three places in Senior Male Recurve when competing against MMU Cheshire and Huddersfield, with Sally Morris taking first place in the female version of this category. Laura Bestwick also obtained first place in the Female Novice Recurve.
In the NEUAL indoor championship, the Lancaster team took home a well-earned second place, making Lancaster the second best University Archery Club in the North West. Combined with second place for Matt Evans in Longbow and third for Mathew Tripp with his Barebow, the championship was highly successful for the club. As Matt McCormack quoted, “Lancaster was well represented this year.”
Perhaps the most prestigious event of the season was the British Universities and College Sports (BUCS) competition. The indoor version took place on 18th February and resulted in the senior team achieving an impressive twelfth place out of 42 teams, with just one arrow separating 11th to 14th place.
To be second in the North West is a very impressive feat for the club considering some of the challenges they have faced over the past year. Since the new building of the Sports Centre, they have lost three hours of training time, taking it down to only two sessions a week. When this is compared to Edinburgh, who have 24 hour access to a range, it does make the results highly remarkable.
