June 11, 2015 - 11:19pm - by Aspen Salisbury

On Saturday 11th April, 3 teams travelled to Crawley to compete in the Sussex County Archery Association 2015 Indoor Open Team Event. Alton and Four Marks Archers entered two senior teams and one junior team. The event was held at the amazing K2 sports centre which dwarfs Alton Sports Centre! The main hall was set up length ways with about 27 teams of 4 entered.

Before the shooting started Katie, Sophie and I were looking around at the archery stalls outside at some unusual archery equipment etc. we saw a strange green ‘cover’ which none of us could place as archery equipment so Katie asked the shop keeper what it was…… “an i pad case” was the answer!! Obviously the next piece of must have archery kit is an i pad (hey Mum and Dad!!!)

During the day there had been individual events in which Luca Wright and Sophie Garrett had entered. The team event commenced a little later than anticipated at 5.30pm.

It was amazing to see so many people shooting with a range of different bows. In the teams we shot in pairs but all had a different face to shoot on. As it was an official record scoring event we had to mark every shot on the face with a pen mark when we scored so scoring took a bit longer than normal.

It was quite warm in the hall and it took quite a while to shoot, especially as we shot in 3s.

The overall scores for Alton and Four Marks were:

• 12 Alton & Four Marks A (Sophie Hales, Thomas Frew, James McAndrew, Carole Whittle) 1843
• 24 Alton & Four Marks B (Geoff Buss, Katie Hughes, Richard Ellis, Paul Leahy) 1463
• 26 Alton & Four Marks Juniors (Sophie Garrett, Luca Wright, Aspen Salisbury, Daniel Kelley) 1371

Individual best performances were from Carole, who came 5 out of 26 Ladies and Richard and James came 26 and 27 out of 54 in the Gentlemen.

We all had a fun evening and it was great experience, as for many of us it was a first or early competition. I think it will put us in a better position for future competitions.

Thank you to Katie for organising our entries and keeping us going during the event.