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Our annual membership cost has been fixed at £30 for the past decade. We work hard to keep our club as accessible as possible, but in order to be sustainable, we need your support!
We’re one of the largest sport clubs in the University of York, with over 100 active members and an even mix of experienced archers and beginners.
We’ve been around since the early days of the university, and we’re still going strong! Enthusiasm and engagement is higher than ever before. Every session is busy, and we’re very well represented at both national and county-level competitions, with excellent results across all categories.
Our annual membership is a fraction of the cost of a typical archery club, and one of the cheapest Black Tier sports clubs at York. With us, people from all backgrounds can get involved with a very accessible sport, promoting mental and physical wellbeing for all.
We support a wide range of disabilities too, from wheelchair users to people with visual impairments. We really mean it when we say that anyone can get involved!
We welcome any support you can offer - every donation makes a real difference.
We’ve been looking to upgrade and replace much of our equipment for some time, and with a huge influx of new members this year we’re struggling to provide good quality kit for everyone.
Our highest priority is a new foam target - our existing ones are full of holes from all the accurate shooting we’ve been doing. We also need to get some new arrows, as over time they get worn down, bent, and broken - and we don’t have enough. In addition, we need to buy two new medium-sized bows suitable for use by experienced archers, so that we can fulfill our promise of lending equipment to anyone who wants it, for as long as they want. We want no obligation for any of our members to spend hundreds of pounds on equipment in order to continue shooting with us! We’re aiming to raise £2000 for this purpose - and the more donations we get, the better quality kit we can afford to invest in!
We also need to think about the future of the club - every year a few of our student coaches graduate, so we constantly need to train more. A coaching course costs £400 in total, and provides our coaches with training to teach complete beginners, and support disabilities of all kinds. Training one new coach over the next few months will keep us going for the next two years!
Moreover, our transport costs are always growing. We’re dedicated to our competitions, and we’ve recently adventured as far as Aberdeen with 11 archers for BUCS, but our savings are slowly draining away. We don’t want to limit the numbers we can send to competitions - taking part is such fun, and a brilliant way to improve. We currently charge experienced archers only £5 for travel to competitions, and novices come for free to encourage participation. Everything else is covered by the club, and we want to keep it that way. Donations exceeding our £2400 aim for equipment and coaching will contribute to this mission, and keep our archers experiencing the fun of competitions for many years to come!
We’ve planned a wide range of challenges for all of our members to contribute to.
All-Week Challenges (between 9am Sat 8th - 9pm Sun 16th)
We Would Walk 500 Miles…
Collective step count challenge. The distance from York to Lancaster is 70 miles. How many times can we walk the equivalent distance to Lancaster and back during the week? We'll be running laps around them before Roses has even begun!
On the Shoulders of Giants
We’ll be accepting submissions of postal scores from alumni across the country, throughout the week. These are the wonderful people who gave our club its reputation and ethos, and we wouldn't be here without them! But, of course, our current talent outshines our previous membership… doesn’t it? Current members can submit scores as well, and we can see how we rank!
Saturday 8th March - A Different Kind of Target Practice
During our training session, we’ll be using dartboard-style targets. A good casual darts player can get a three-dart average of about 50 points, and professionals can get upwards of 70 points. Will our scores measure up? In the evening, we’ll have a go at proper darts, and challenge any darts players in the room to a contest. Which we’ll win, of course. (Archery is a transferable skill, right?)
Sunday 9th March - Conquering the County
We're sending 14 archers to Yorkshire Indoor Champs, where we'll be making a name for our club at the public county championships. This is no students’ league - we'll be up against the best archers in Yorkshire. Let's show them what we're made of!
Tuesday 11th March - Anyone can do Archery!
We really mean it! During our Tuesday training session (12-3pm) we'll be challenging our members to have a go at some of the adapted archery styles used by people with disabilities. Can we match our usual scores when doing seated archery, or blindfolded archery with a tactile sight?
Wednesday 12th March - The Apollo Challenge
The only thing better than all-day breakfast is all-day archery. On Wednesday we’ll be shooting for as long as the sun remains in the sky! This will be taking place at the York Archers Society outdoors range. That’s right - not only will we be doing archery for 12 hours straight, we’ll be doing it outdoors, getting a head start on Lancaster in preparation for Roses this year.
The rules are as follows: from dawn 'til dusk (6:30 - 18:30) we shall have at least one archer on the shooting line or collecting arrows at all times.
Some mini challenges for the day:
- Together, can we shoot a total of ten thousand arrows? We'd need 25 archers on the line shooting 400 arrows each over the day. That's a typical daily arrow count for an olympic archer!
- The ultimate archery challenge: can anyone shoot an apple off the head of our favourite foam gremlin target (Geoffrey)?
- We'll also be having a go at a variety of outdoors rounds, including a York round, and Clout. How many different rounds can we cross off our archery bingo sheet in one day?!
Thursday 13th - Archery Obstacle Course
A series of weird and wonderful archery challenges of all kinds
- Can you shoot while balancing a rubber duck on your head?
- Can you shoot with your non-dominant hand?
- How many arrows can you shoot in 20 seconds (and how well will you score?)
- How long can you hold your bow drawn for?
- The Odysseus challenge: shoot an arrow through a set of rings without hitting them. (That's harder than it sounds - the arrow curves as it flies, so we’ll have to get the trajectory just right). Inspired by the Odyssey, in which Odysseus shoots a single arrow through the holes of twelve axeheads at once.
There will be a points scheme for each mini challenge. This is the perfect chance for us to settle the biggest question in archery: which style is better, sighted or non-sighted? Whichever team earns more points-per-person is deemed the winner, until next year. (Of course, we all already know which is best, but we have to give the other side a chance…)
Saturday 15th - Look how far we’ve come!
Time to see how we ranked against our alumni in the postal Portsmouth that was running throughout the week. During our training session, we'll be running a Head-to-Head against alumni who are able to join us in person. Let's prove that our current talent has surpassed our predecessors!
Finally, on Sunday 16th, we’re wrapping up challenge week at BUCS finals, where we’ll be representing the University of York against the best student archers in the country. We’re sending both novice and experienced archers, in both recurve and barebow categories, and looking forward to some great results!
Find us on Instagram and Facebook @uoyarchery and follow along with our Challenge Week happenings.
Visit our SU webpage for more information about joining our club as a student or an associate.
All the useful links can be found on our Linktree.
We would love you to donate as much or as little as you are able and any donations are hugely appreciated. Your donation could also help us unlock fundraising challenges which will help us reach our goal even faster (you can see these on the challenges page).
If you are looking to support an individual athlete or challenge please put a message with your donation saying who!
Alternatively, if you are unable to donate then please do spread the word by signing up as a Challenge Week ambassador for our club, and sharing our social media posts to your own socials so as many people as possible can read about our efforts!