Three evenings a week, students make arrows fly across the Duncan McArthur Hall gym on West Campus, practising a skill that’s been around since the Stone Age.
This Sunday evening, 22 students gathered to practice the sport. With five targets set out in front of them, the students — all from different experience levels — pick up arrow after arrow to attempt that well-placed shot.
There’s been evidence of archery’s invention in the Paleolithic Era, a time when stone tools were first used by humans.
It’s since been used as a tool for hunting and combat, with the Mongolians creating their empire with arrows on horseback. Nowadays, it’s a recreational and competitive sport, with a place in the summer Olympics.
One of the students tonight, Chris Ormrod, has been shooting arrows since he was young, a love affair that began when his uncle would let him practice with a bow and arrow at the family cottage.
“Let’s be honest,” Ormrod, ArtSci ’14, said, “it’s not hard to be entranced by the weapon of Robin Hood.”
But it’s not so easy to master the sport.
“That’s the lore of it, actually,” he said. “Basic archery is very easy to get the hang of but it’s the fine points in getting yourself really well-trained.
“That’s what takes all the time. That’s what all archers strive to do.”
According to Raymond Lee, president of the archery club, there’s a common misconception that archery is as easy as movie characters make it seem.
“[People think] it’s like The Hunger Games,” Lee, Kin ’13, said. “Seriously. People have the expectation that they can come in and be an expert archer but it’s not true.”
For Lee, who began practicing archery over seven years ago, it was the difficulty of the sport, classified as a recreational club under Queen’s Athletics, that drew him in.
“Archery’s a different kind of sport that’s not fueled by a lot of energy,” he said. “It’s mostly focused on concentration and very minute differences in accuracy, so that’s kind of the challenge.”
It’s a sport where a heartbeat can make a difference. It all comes down to muscle control, apparently.
Lee tells me of how, in Olympic archery where the target is 90 metres away, athletes must make sure they don’t shoot during a heartbeat. A pulse can shift the bow enough to miss the target.
“You do not have a huge range of discrepancy,” he said.
While the people in the room may not be Olympic athletes, the club, which is competing in a Toronto tournament in the coming months, still enjoys steady participation from the student body.
There’s an array of 75 to 100 people regularly attending one of the three weekly practices.
Still, Lee said, it’s not as much as it could be if the club were still on main campus.
“It’s a lot more accessible,” he said. “When we were back at the PEC we had better range … we had a lot more room.”
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