T
he women of the Columbia University
archery team stepped out of their van on a
cold spring afternoon with a relaxed focus;
one held a half-eaten ice cream cone in her right
hand and a fistful of arrows with yellow fletching
in her left; another sported a mesh guard over her
shirt, on top of her breast as protection from the
tension line of the bow. Baker Athletics Complex,
the university’s sporting fields at the northern tip
of Manhattan, seemed to have a set of carefree
warriors on its grounds.
A man who maintains the property never thought
they would arrive. Maybe he was new, because I
asked where the archery team would practice and
he looked at me quizzically. He didn’t believe that
archery was a real Columbia team sport. It was
understandable. I had arrived early and the targets
were not yet up. Releasing arrows at up to 150
miles per hour aimed at targets seventy-five yards
away means safety issues for all around, so the
archery team doesn’t practice next to any other.
Mastery of this high-precision sport stays largely
out of sight.
Coach Derek Davis drove up with the archers and
greeted me with his elbow leaning against the
gray van’s driver’s side window. His silvery-white
dreadlocks hung past his shoulders, covered
under a blue patterned bandana that matched
his Columbia University archery sweatshirt. He
struck me as a composite fit to match this clan:
gregarious and at ease, yet focused. On the phone
a few days earlier, he had told me that he first
picked up the sport as a casual hobby at his wife’s
insistence in the late 1980s (“It was safer than pool
and didn’t involve alcohol”). He has led the varsity
and intramural club teams since 2005 as one-part
biomechanical expert, one-part yogi—a university
sage fit for ancient warfare turned sport.
The young women smiled and sized me up a little,
then passed as I stood beside the chain-link fence
entrance to their designated turf. One threw away
her melting cone and joined the others who were
unpacking the gear from the van’s trunk. They
spoke not with words, but by exchanging numbers,
their ideal scores or degrees to position themselves
to hit their targets.
The women were preparing for an upcoming
Nationals competition.
(There are no men on this varsity team, only at the
intramural level of play.) I watched as they carefully
set down their compound and recurve bows—like
those used at the Olympics, with tips that bend
away from the archer—then drew and let loose
arrows that curved and fell out of sight as they hit
the round target face. Davis didn’t hover, but stood
a good distance behind them, perhaps assessing
who might need support. Spread out, farther off at
the edge of the turf, were toolkits filled with spools,
pliers, wrenches, hammers, and nails.
Two archers lined up to shoot. Only one wanted
to know her score. Davis was looking with his
binoculars downrange, the length of nearly two
tennis courts from their location, as one archer let
her first arrow fly. I could just hear the sound of a
whip cracking the air.
“Seven at six o’clock.” “Nine at two o’clock.”
Her shots weren’t grouping yet.
“Ten, high.”
“Ten, way high.”
After the next arrow sailed, there was no sound.
“No. Don’t look at that one!”
she said, shifting her feet,
dropping her bow.
“I don’t even think it hit the target.”
“Yeah,”
Davis confirmed
, “I don’t even see it.”
As I stood behind her, trying to place myself in her
position, I couldn’t imagine how even one had hit
the target. Every archer calculates the arc of a
rise (the drop and horizontal shifts of an arrow’s
path), a trajectory only they can predict. Before
even accounting for wind speeds, there is always
some degree of displacement that happens when
the arrow leaves the bow at a skew angle from the
target so that the fletching doesn’t hit the string
upon release. This is how the arrow is crafted. If you
By Keynote Speaker, Sarah Lewis
ARCHER ’
S
PARA dO x
16
HR
West
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