NUSIIAC - Day 1

NUSIIAC – Day 1

Okay. 9 Brave souls namely Dylan, Aaron, Ongnardo, Si Rui, Mingwei, Daniel, Hwee Juin, Christopher and Kang Rui + our beloved J2s Ming Jie, Jia Hao, Heidi and Kim participated in the manly NUS Invitational Indoor Archery Championship. Bearing in mind that this is a very competitive competition, we had some manly sessions in both the indoor and outdoor ranges. Preparations were of course without hiccups along the way. We forgot to take bows from the store and the day before we found the store locked beyond any hope of redemption. Plan A to wait for someone to come failed. Plan B to break in failed and finally we had to resort to Plan C which is to take the key and open it the next morning haiz….
-edit by aaron-
I met sirui at the range uber early in the morning with the KEY (thanks ongnardo for giving me the wrong address) and we had berakfast then cabbed down to nus. the wonderful cabbie who reminds me of mr ngan couldnt find the place so we alighted at some random bus stop and were given a lift by a passing group of FAAC archers in a van (thanks random archers!)
-/edit-
Well, the morning came and it was the very first competition for much of us since those who participates now are more of the ones who did not participate in the Punggol Angsana Shoot. Me, Chris and Kangrui paid $14.60 to the imba expensive cab from Hougang and easily found the place owing to our great navigational skills. The hall is rather large and the shooting boards are at the two sides of the hall (Please refer to the pictures). Our Koach Ken is already there with our ex-captain Kimberly and all the TP archers. Usual stuff… set up bow… Collect money which amounts to a grand total of 250bux for 10ppl. Soon after we went to do warm-up with the TP archers, they got a lot and form an outer orbital while we form the inner quantum shell (mug too much). The champ then came at around 8 15 after we all thought that he will wake up late. Ng Li-Ting Annalyn now suddenly appears out of nowhere and gave us a bag full of Hao Liao( Good stuff) for supplies. Thanks a lot Annalyn!! After that she left as suddenly as she came. At this point everyone starts to feel the heat( actually it was damn cold because of the air-con, hands are clammy, legs feel jittery etc.) Haiz, rather typical since most of us here are those who did not take part in the Punggol shoot because of a wide variety of reasons. Nevertheless we still feel quite man and yeah, JUST DO IT!!

At this point, our two great supporters have arrived – Daryl Chia and Wee Jian Ting Natalie. Hmm at least we HAVE supporters during the competition, a real privilege.

Erm, for the benefit of those who do not know: Format – 3 arrows / end 10 ends / round 2 rounds. Distance = 18m, target face = 40cm, same for all classes. Classes are 1) Standard and 2) Open. Since we are n00b n dun have the long thing yet, we of course took part in Standard.

Team captains ‘ meeting, Hwee Juin became the de facto captain and we were informed of some nitty gritty details like whistle, judge call ($100 WAD THE MAN) etc. Yeah and now for the sighting end. Somehow they decide to be stingy and only gave us one end of 3 arrows for sighting. It’s the first few arrows of the day… haven’t feel pumped up yet and so yea, the arrows were all over the place, and looking at my competitors they were rather man, especially the one who shoot the same target paper as me, quite man.

“The first end is gonna start in 5mins time… 3mins time… 1min time… FIRST DETAIL, PLEASE STEP TO THE SHOOTING LINE. Okay the competition started. There were quite a lot of people in standard class, 93 MeN and 46 woMeN and there were 24 boards each with 4 target papers. Hence there was all the way up to the3rd detail. Not bad also, a lot of time to rest and calm down in between. Finally the 3rd detail came and yeah I stepped forward to shoot the very first arrow in a REAL COMPETITION. At this point there was a sudden realization that I am actually in a blurdy competition and each and every arrow will fly and can never come back, just lyk the ancient Chinese saying. This sudden enlightenment did not do any good. First arrow – blue (quite off), 2nd – another blue (shid…) 3rd – black (nooooooo…14points total). This is definitely not the best start of any competition, cannot continue the rest like this…

Fortunately for me, I walked around, relaxed, happily met an old RI scout which somewhat inspired me and continied my 2nd end which was much better (at least more than). It was a good thing that I progressed steadily throughout the first round and managed to maintain a relatively stable score. Most of them are in the low 20s since there is always a nasty blue somehow in my shots. Haiz…

Meanwhile, while walking around, it seems that Chris is doing quite fine in the first round, hitting the yellow consistently and slowly and Aaron with his usual Stafe™ that allows him to shoot with amazing speed, finishing first every end ( in terms of timing nt score). Daniel meanwhile plays along with his Angel™ tab, at the same time working on the form. On the other side, Mingwei and Hwee Juin seems to be doing fine as they complain of a “yellow drought”. Dylan, Si Rui and KangRui like me seems to have early jitters but all went along fine after that.

End of the first round, everyone reports their scores. Okay, we seem to be averaging 150-200 which was definitely lower than our usual practice scores, rather disappointing. Best round goes to Aaron with 230/300. Haiz, better improve in the next round, after eating a muesli bar and some of the other random stuff in the goody bag, sponsored by M1.

Round 2 starts and we all feel pumped up, trying our best to improve our dismal score. For myself I still feel quite MaN at the start, hitting the usual low 20s but things started to change and started hitting quite good scores peaking with a 28 but it seems to have hit a maximum point, dy/dx=0, d^2y/dx^2 < 0. Shid, more and more screwups start to happen. Somehow the arrows start to evade the yellow. I neatly hit all 3 arrows on blue on below but on closer inspection, all linecut 7 ( heng, but was rather lucky, quite screw up as all is all over the paper). Forunately, the curve soon hit a minimum point and the last few ends were relatively good.

Chris meanwhile has improved quite a bit over the previous round and as usual, he competes in terms of endurance with another guy from NJ who holds for as long as he does. At last he has finally found his match. Aaron’s fast shooting methods seem to detoriate as the 2nd round was definitely not his best, with a very big drop in score ( attributed to a MaNly sight). Daniel, under the watchful eye of Kenneth and the Angel™’s blessing has improved his form and scored much better. As for MingJie… no comment… he’s in nirvana.

On the other side, Hwee Juin with her coolio Samick Masters ( hmm she was the only Samick Masters to join NUS Indoor) scored quite ok, a little better than the first round but Mingwei feels the heat of the competition too much and was not in her best form in this round. Dylan however performed much better, scoring 20++ each end, rather impressive. Kang Rui wasn’t relly at his best that day and was feeling quite disappointed (Relax man). Si Rui however, did better in the 2nd round and has a more consistent score.

And so the competition has ended. Taking score… I had a nice chat while plucking out arrows with my board-mate, an NP archer, talked so much kok tt the Judge scolded us lolz. Hmm it seems that we have met quite a lot of new people in this competition and it was quite an experience. Quickly, we went to the shooting area which is now empty to pack up our bows. It was quite fast and MingJie opened the bag of sweets I an explosive fashion and we had a good laugh lolz. Took some group photos and finally we set off for lunch as our J2s who are participating in the Open event came.

Lunch as usual is rather indecisive, pizza-man will be lost in the great maze of NUS so we desided to go to the famous NUS cheese prata shop. We had quite a nice lunch with all the cheesy prata and Milo™ Dinosaur. Toking kok about all sorts of stuff, from Karl Sew to Compund Bows. Spent a rather lot of time there.

We then went back to watch our dear seniors. The standard class results are already out. Wow, what happened to all the suspense, drumrolls and everything??? Err I got 12th with 449, Hwee Juin got 11th with ?420? Aaron 16th with 420. Chris ?20th? with 410. Sorry I’m not too sure about the exact figures. Please look at http://www.nusarchery.org/results.htm for more details.

Well, none of us made it to the top ten which is dominated by NUS and NTU and some people from Polytechnics and funny archery clubs. Hmm, nevertheless it was a good competition when we can really see our standards among others in Singapore.

After that we merely slacked around, watching our Coach Mr. Ang, Kim, Heidi and Jia Hao shoot. Please refer to the pictures to find out what we did during this time, all the funny stuff like spotting Mr. KS, talking crap etc, essentially having fun! Our seniors did relatively well in the end, with Kim getting 4th for women’s open class. Congrats! Our koach was in 14th position in Men’s Open Class.

In the end, the team results are announced with one of our team barely making it to the team event. The team comprises of Chris, Aaron, KangRui and MING JIE. After this we all went home and so please read the next entry to finds out more about the team event!!