Justin Curley never shot a bow before attending the Archery Festival at the Enormous Activities Fair as a first-year student in September.
“It sucked me in,” Curley said.
Every year, Club Archery hosts the Archery Festival during the first week of fall quarter. Students can shoot arrows for free and test whether or not they have an interest in the sport.
Unlike other club sports, the archery team consists mostly of people who have had little to no experience with the sport before joining.
Daniel Kho, a 2017 computer science alumnus, was on the archery team since his first year. Kho had no idea coming into college that he would have an interest in archery, he said.
“I’ve always been doing some sort of competitive thing,” Kho said. “Whether it was track and field, cross country or competitive robotics. When I came to college, I wasn’t intentionally looking for something competitive, but archery was something I really enjoyed.”
In May, the team competed in an outdoor tournament in Chula Vista, California. Kho and his teammates managed to win medals in team and individual play, including a gold medal for the Barebow Mixed team.
Curley, who is now in the same position Kho was in four years ago, said the key to improving and reaching that level of success is in the mental side of the game.
“Archery is very mentally focused and if you let your mental state drop as you’re shooting, it’s just going to spiral you down,” Curley said.
Alvin Vuong, a 2017 computer science alumnus, has been competing with the team for more than three years and said the mental pressures of other sports he has played do not compare to that of archery.
“Throughout a tournament, you are expected to shoot near perfection without making a mistake,” Vuong said. “In a baseball game, you can strike out one inning and come back the next inning and be fine. In archery, if you miss an arrow when it counts, it sticks and stays with you throughout the tournament.”
Former team president Kimberly Wang took note of the team’s lack of effort to improve its mental game over the previous few years and said she was very proactive in trying to reverse that trend.
“As a team, we have been trying to focus on the mental aspect,” Wang said. “I think we have been neglecting that as a team for the past two years and so this year we tried something new with mental workshops, talking to people about their mental game and asking them how they like to be coached.”
But Wang’s leadership and dedication to improving her squad’s mental game is only half of the equation.
The mechanics of archery can be just as tedious, and require immense amounts of focus and repetition. For rising fourth-year computational and systems biology student Angela Lam, the process of finding the correct shot can take weeks of practice and many hours of pinpointing the issue.
“Even though it doesn’t seem like it does a lot in the beginning, when you take everything apart and slowly fix it, it works,” Lam said.
Kho shared similar thoughts, saying that every aspect of the shot must be focused on because it is important to identify the habits that could be altering a shot.
Lam will take over as team president next season and was part of the team that finished fourth in the Recurve Division team matches in May. Lam said she is happy with the work she put in on her mechanics and the results she received at the tournament since they entered the competition as the 12th seed.
“Getting from 12th to fourth was still a great accomplishment,” Lam said. “Everybody was proud of it.”
Wang competed in over 10 tournaments in her time with the club and said that she struggled with her mechanics this past season, but it was the relationships and learning about other people’s experiences that kept her positive.
“I love talking to the people around me and getting to know how they got into archery,” Wang said. “There aren’t a lot of people who do it, but the people who do it and stick with it are very passionate about it. Collegiate archery is particularly fun because a lot of people don’t start archery until they get into college.”
Wang said that the end of the year is an emotional time for the graduating members of the team. Most of them began the journey together and will have to leave their days as teammates behind, including Vuong.
“A lot of our graduating class joined at the same time and we’ve been in archery for basically four years so we are really, really close because all we did was class and archery,” Vuong said. “It’s been fun.”