This year, BUCS Outdoors was oversubscribed by around 100 entries. The resulted in a cut to just 11 archers per club. Some notable established clubs such as Edinburgh were particularly badly hit by this, and generally it was Novice archers who were cut. With the continued growth of sactudent archery, the situation is likely to continue to worsen over the next few years.
Before the event, the UKSAA proposed three possible changes on their Facebook page. These were:
- Increase the qualification score
- Stop running the 720/Head to Head and run two days of 1440 with archers shooting one day (novice day and experienced day)
- Award places to clubs based on previous results and/or national rankings
I proposed a more radical change to a two day 720/Head to Head event similar to a world cup leg, the details of which are presented here.
There was almost complete support for an increase in the qualifiction score to first class standard. However, the majority of archers who qualified this year had actually achieved this higher standard, and an increase in standard to this score woul be a short term measure given the growth rate in the number of clubs. The next obvious barrier above that at Bowman standard would cut the majority of the field, including several individuals who finished on team podiums, so this is too high a standard.
There was a lot of vocal support for the 720 round, citing both national ranking requirements and the official dropping of the 1440 round by World Archery.
There was unilateral opposition to clubs qualifying their places based on previous results or rankings and the turnover of membership in many clubs is rapid, and one the standards achieved one year do not fairly reflect the standard in the following year.
My idea received strong support from a cross section of the top clubs and individuals, with various proposals made to tweak the format in different ways from my initial proposal.
Competition format:
- Experienced Recurve, Experienced Compound, Novice Recurve: 720 for all entrants, top 32 proceed to head to head eliminations with points awarded to the top four archers in the eliminations for the experienced categories. Experienced Recurve archers shoot 70m, novice recurves 60m and compounds 50m (small faces).
- Novice Compound, all Barebow, all Longbow: 720 with points awarded to the four highest scores in the experienced categories. Compounds shoot 50m, Experienced barebows and longbows 70m and novice barebows and longbows 60m.
- Recurve teams (experienced gents, experienced ladies, novice open) will shoot a 720 with the three highest scores forming a team. The top eight teams proceed to team elimination rounds. All eight teams in the elimination rounds will be awarded points, and all teams will compete in three matches to achieve a complete ranking.
Saturday
- 0830: Practice for session 1
- 0915: Session 1 scoring
- 1330: Session 1 complete
- 1400: Practice for session 2
- 1445: Session 2 scoring
- 1900: Session 2 complete
- 1930: Awards for 720 only categories
The disciplines competing in each session will be determined based on the number of entries. All archers in a given discipline must compete in the same session.
Sunday
- 0830: Open Practice
- 0915: 1/16 round GR, NGR, LC
- 1000: 1/16 round LR, NLR, GC
- 1045: 1/8 round
- 1130: 1/4 finals
- 1215: 1/2 finals
- 1300: Lunch
- 1330: Open practice
- 1400: Team 1/4 rounds
- 1445: Team 1/2 finals
- 1530: Team lower ranking matches (3rd place down)
- 1615: Team finals matches (alternate shooting)
- 1715: Individual bronze medal matches (alternate shooting)
- 1815: Individual final matches (alternate shooting)
- 1930: Awards ceremonies
In the event that the Sunday runs late, some of the final rounds can be run simultaneously, and to DOS control to make up time.
- Capacity grows to 560 archers, which should be sufficient for the foreseeable future. This fits the remit of a participation event.
- Format is modelled on international standards. This fits the remit of a high performance event.
- The second day of head to head matches would be a much more spectator friendly way to determine the winners.
- Allows a student club to be significantly involved with the organisation of the event, similar the indoors, as no club would have all of its membes competing all the time.
The primary reason for having the cut is the inclusion of team head to head matches. BUTC is the most exciting, spectator friendly competition shot at student level. Bringing some of this team excitement to the outdoor champs seems to me an obvious decision. It also continues the theme of mimicing the world cup leg format.
In an ideal world, we might give all the competitors a chance to take part in head to head matches. If we dropped the team elimination matches, then there is enough time to complete this.
The scheduling would be quite awkward. Using the entry numbers from BUCS indoors 2012 as a sample, there would be:
- 175 GR
- 63 LR
- 17 GC
- 12 LC
- 92 NGR
- 62 NLR
The schedule then looks perhaps like this:
- 0915: 1/128 round GR (64 targets)
- 1000: 1/64 round GR (64 targets)
- 1045: 1/64 round NGR, 1/32 round GR (64 targets)
- 1130: 1/32 round NGR, LR (64 targets)
- 1215: 1/32 round NLR, 1/16 NGR, 1/16 LR (64 targets)
- 1300: Lunch
- 1330: Open practice
- 1400: 1/16 round GC, GR, NLR (48 targets)
- 1445: 1/8 round
- 1530: 1/4 finals
- 1615: Semi finals
- 1715: Final matches (alternate shooting)
- 1830: Awards ceremonies
This schedule involves spending most of the morning shooting early knockout rounds. Some bow disciplines have long waits, sometimes between rounds (GR have over 2 hours between the 1/32 and the 1/16). If the novies are to shoot at 60m, there will also be a large amount of moving targets back and forth - note that all of any given round is required to be shot simultaneously.
Note that this schedule is near full, there is no way of running complete H2H matches for the other bowstyles as well here, the following categories are not included:
- 18 LBB
- 29 GBB
- 3 NGC
- 1 NLC
- 22 NGBB
- 9 NLBB
- 3 NGLB
- 1 NLLB
Including these categories would add at least two passes to the day, and in the smaller categories they would be hanging around until after 5pm before shooting.
32 has been chosen partly because it will result in a cut in almost every category, rather than only affecting experienced gents recurve, and partly because it works well with the time restrictions.
There are multiple factors behind the decision not to run head to heads for unsighted archers. Unlike the recently run BUCS head to head, if we are to award BUCS points on head to head matches we cannot combine categories together. This means expanding the number of categories running head to head matches by at least 4, probably 6 (experienced longbow, experienced barebow, novice barebow, both genders). Even with cuts in place, this would remove the ability to run the team matches.
Longbow and barebow archers are no longer required to compete in head to head matches for national rankings, and neither is a recognised target discipline internationally.
On discussions with Lizzy Rees and Huw Vaughan-Jackson (the winners of the gents and ladies barebow divisions this year), they both independantly expressed the opinion that barebow head to head matches are only a fair contest between the very best barebow or longbow archers. At lower score levels, and using the set system, the match is determined by who gets hits, and the short format does not give a fair reflection of the better archer.
It is worth noting here that the standard of barebow archers (gents in particular) is on average much lower - around half the experienced gents barebow entrants to BUCS outdoors have failed to achieve a first class score in the last 3 years, as opposed to around 10% of recurve archers.
For novice compounds, it is simply a case that there are extremely few entries every year, most student compound archers train as recurves for the first year. Unfortunately due to BUCS regulations, we cannot allow anyone entered as a novice on the first day to compete in the experienced category the next day. For similar reasons, barebow archers are ineligible for the recurve eliminations.
BUCS already takes an extremely long time to complete, and is one of the largest outdoor competitions in the country. Work party and judging teams are stretched to their limits at 70 targets.