National Indoor Championships
Three events, three different rounds, 900 competitors, 40 volunteers and 37 trophies later, the biggest Archery GB weekend of the year was done
All the action from Stoneleigh
The Archery GB Back2back, Junior National Indoor Championships and National Championships, hosted at Stoneleigh Park, just outside of Birmingham, all went down on the same busy weekend. It opened with the junior competition, then the Back2back, now running for eight years and for the past three at Stoneleigh Park's National Exhibition Centre. This year was notable for seeing the highest turnout of female compound archers ever in the UK.
Within the Back2back, each archer must shoot round robin head-to-head rounds within their group of five other archers. For each win from the 12 arrow match, the archer will receive two points, for a draw, one point and losing results in zero points. The top two archers from each group automatically goes through to the next round, with the top eight cumulative score winners joining them.
The lowest score to qualify without being top two in a group, in the compound men, was higher than two of the scores who qualified automatically. In the ladies compound, one whole group went through with top scores within the category and winning the most matches. Recurve men only had one archer win all of his matches: Alex Wise with a cumulative score of 567/600. However, the ladies recurve group winners all won every match they shot in. The highest cumulative score was Naomi Folkard with 585/600, which equalled the highest recurve men’s score.
Following the matches from the second round, the winning six archers, ranked from their second round cumulative score, are through to the finals which is shot in a shootup format. This simply means that the 6th ranked archer shoots against 5th, the winner of that match goes against 4th place, etc, until the final. This year the winners were Sarah Prieels, Adam Ravenscroft, Naomi Folkard and Jacob Reid. Adam and Naomi both won the first ever Back2back event in 2010 in Telford.
“It doesn’t matter how many times you win this event, it’s still an amazing feeling especially with the competition getting harder year on year. I would never have expected to win when I turned up this morning, there are so many top archers.”, said Adam Ravenscroft afterwards.
National Indoor Championships
The third and final event of the weekend was the longest of all. Session 1 started at 08:30, and the last match finished at 19:40. A WA18 qualification round was followed by headto-head rounds starting at the 1/16 in each category, except longbow.
In the compound men, there were no 150 or 149 matches, but we saw two 148 matches by Duncan Busby in the semi-finals, who went on to win. There were two by Jake Walsh in the 1/16 and 1/8 rounds and Kai Thomas-prause in the 1/16 round. The compound women didn’t manage a perfect match either, but Sarah Prieels had the highest average match score of 147.2, and was also the only woman to shoot over 147 in a match.
Sarah Prieels spoke about her weekend and the win, “I am happy to win my first national indoor, it means a lot to me to win these competition even if I can’t get the title. I am very happy with how I shot all weekend, my scores were great and hopefully it is the first win of many this season.”
There were 10 straight match wins in the recurve women, out of 32 matches. Bryony Pitman won the finals giving her the Indoor and Outdoor National titles. Although there were less competitors than 2017, the highest qualification score was 12 points higher this year: Sarah Bettles with 584.
In the recurve men, Thomas Susca, GB youth team member had the highest score of 585, two points ahead of 2nd place. However, Gilbert Jamieson took the title. The recurve men were the biggest category with 142 athletes competing. “It was an awesome weekend, I’m so happy with how smoothly it was run by the volunteers. Everyone seemed to have an amazing time and I’m already looking forward to next year!”, said Jon Nott, Archery GB event director.