SEAL Leg 1 – So close yet so far!

2016-11-30

At a glance

Portsmouth round results:
Sara Rubio, Senior Ladies Recurve, 566, new all time Southampton SEAL competition record
Juste Valyte, Senior Ladies Recurve, 541
Matthew Wellman, Senior Gents Recurve, 517
Nick Wilson, Senior Gents Recurve, 470
Janna Collier, Senior Ladies Recurve, 450
Harry Moncrieff Macmillan, Novice Gents Recurve, 449
Hari Kulendran,Novice Gents Recurve, 422
Callum Anderson,Novice Gents Recurve, 385
Joshua Wright, Novice Gents Recurve, 333

Senior Team: Sara, Juste, Matthew, Nick, 2094 (4th)
Novice Team: Harry, Hari, Callum, 1256 (4th)

Match report

The first SEAL match of the 2016/17 season was held by Southampton with Reading Uni coming to visit to shoot against us! There were other matches going on across the same weekend in East Anglia, Kent and Brunel to complete the fixtures. The 9 person team selected had a tough task, shooting on a chilly Sunday morning in the range after some jedi mind tricks had managed to unscrew both Nick’s and Janna’s buttons while they were practicing during the week

Most people started ok, although Joshua had to start with a new set of arrows after sighters as one of them was broken. This meant he started with three misses. Sara was shooting well from the beginning, putting in tens regularly. At the half way stage there were only seven points separating Harry, Hari and Callum, with all three of them being in the top 4 novices when you combined Reading’s scores and Southampton’s. Juste didn’t have a great start but then caught up with Matthew by half way, at which point Matthew’s work and illness started taking it’s toll and he started shooting a few more bad arrows.

The match overall was a lot of fun, with Southampton having beaten Reading convincingly in both the novices and seniors. However, when scores for all the other competitions were added up, Southampton’s seniors came fourth, having just squeezed past East Anglia by 3 points, but were only 30 points off second place, a score that was easily doable. The novices also, pushed the other teams close, having been 20 points off of second place also, so there is room for improvement, but we know that the improvement will come! The results for the match and the overall tables can be found here and here.