Junior Home Nations (December 3rd 2006)

[Mistake]

Not sure where this should go, so could a mod move it if it's in the wrong place:

Just finally got round to reading the other letters in the Shooting line and the one from David Randell caught my eye as it mentioned the home nations match.

I'm not taking anything away from Scotland who yes, shot very, very well but it seems that because they where unable to meet the criteria the other 3 teams, NI, England and Wales, paid the penalty for this.

The competition rules stated 2 Junior Gents re-curve, 2 Junior Ladies re-curve and 2 junior Compound archers of unspecified gender. Wales managed it, England managed it and NI managed it, but it turns out that Scotland, being larger both Geographically and population size than either NI or Wales, failed to meet the criteria. Not being funny, but my club, which only has 15 members can field 4 out of the 6 required archers.

All other high level sports if you can't meet the team requirments you either get Dq'd or told "tough... you still have to compete with what you've got", and i've been on a team thats had that told to them, and we went and competed anyway, but it seems that those rules are so flexible there's nothing stopping the exact same incident happening at the Junior Euronations (were i hope to shoot for Wales again) or even at the Olympics.

Again, I'm not taking anything away from Scotland, and i can't speak for the rest of the Welsh team there, or NI and England teams, but i would be severely p**sed off i found out that my score had been removed from the Welsh score because another team had been unable to fill a relatively easy squad criteria (i know that the Welsh team was completely over applied for in all of the criteria, and that happened to three Junior archers, who did nothing more against the rules than apply for, and get on, their respective Home nations team

[Wrexham Exile]

rhod - its happened many times before

i remember at one home nations out door event there was a similar situation involving either scotland or Northern ireland. my dad was team manager at the time and a lot of discussion was going on in the back ground.
i think it was resolved by taking away the worst score (highest handicap?? - think thats right) score from the full teams.

yeah people were annoyed about it but at the end of the day we were all happy to have represented our countries.