Invitational Head to Head 2006

[Marcus26]

Thought this may interest many of you.
We ran a Invitational Matchplay tournament yesterday at my club.
We invited 16 of the best shooters in the state to attend. To get invited you had to:
• For men, shot 1330+ this year in competition
• For women, shot 1300+ in the last year and a bit
• Shoot compound

From that we amassed a very talented group of shooters with
4 juniors
4 women
3 50+ men
13 of them have won a state title in their career

We were also using this as a practise for 2 of my club's juniors going to the world juniors this week.

We broke them into 2 groups. Red and Black.
The Black group were the recently strong performing Mens Compounders. This included Sten, a Cedet off to the worlds.
The Red were all the women, a few junior boys and a couple of Men who have not competed much in the last few months.
Of course, they are all more than capable.

They would shoot 7 12 matchplays rounds at 70m against everyone in their group.
The 2 highest win totals per group then went to the finals where the #1 seed of one group plays the #2 of the other group for the finals.

First up the archers were all introduced with a theme song.

Our DOS was excellent, heckling with the shooters and keeping music playing through the event. The archers asked for the music to play during the ends. The music selection was deverse from 80's rock to classical to hip hop etc etc.
Because it was round robin everyone got to shoot with each other, creating a social feel to what was a serious competition. Everyone tried very hard to win, yet it was friendly and enjoyable.

The weather was terrible. Cold and very very windy. This added alot to the event as it kept the scores close and interesting.

Because it was round robin, archers could have a bad round and stay in the tournament. In fact the eventual winner lost to me in the first round.
Results and images here
http://www.dva.asn.au/target/head2head06.php

It was an excellent format with all archers having the opportunity to shoot alot of arrows and compete during the day. Standard elimination matchplay does little to encourage people to stay and watch, while this kept everyone involved.

Worth a try at your clubs or districts.

[Adam]

Excellent idea and an interesting format Marcus. Pleased to hear it went well. Did it work as a fundraiser too?

Adam

[Marcus26]

No we decided not to do fundraising, although there was money bet on the 2 kids that they could win.
It's something I want to expand on each year and make it an event archers want to be invited to.

[greydog]

Sounds great

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Marcus26

It's something I want to expand on each year and make it an event archers want to be invited to.

If you weren't quite so far away, I'd be there.

Adam

[Marcus26]

Originally Posted by Adam

If you weren't quite so far away, I'd be there.

Adam

no doubt, you and Grey Dog would have been more than welcome.

[hypertigger]

the british unis team champs (the one year i attended) we had the imperial march (being imperial college) on to introduce us when we came to shoot, but it was straight elimination matches. much fun!