USIAC 2007
May 17-20, 2007

( updated 06/05/2007 )

Intro
USIAC Team Members
Day 1 Travel - May 16
Day 1 Photos
Day 2 Practice - May 17
Day 3 First Scoring Day - May 18
Final Entry

Photos on TSAA site by Ron Carmichael

This year USIAC is hosted by Town Hall JOAD & The State of Illinois' World Shooting and Recreational Complex. The location is Sparta Il., which is about an hour south east from St. Louis, MO. Our travel day this year is May 16th. We are traveling on American Airlines flight 5303 at 1:05pm. No early morning flights this year. Yeehaa!

As always if you want to send any well wishes to the team you can email them to jc-av@austin.rr.com.

USIAC 2007 Team

Day 1 (05/16/2007) - Travel
We are here in Sparta, IL. Our flight was uneventful except for arriving early and having to sit on the tarmac waiting for our gate to be ready. We did have some fun getting from Enterprise car rental back to the airport. We decided that James and Ron would go get the vans and come back and pick up the archers. This was the plan because we were planning on picking up an extra body that was coming in later then our flight. On the way back to the airport we ended up in the wrong lane, then I ended up in the wrong lane again and heading for downtown St. Louis. Argh!

I should tell you about the extra body. Lindsey was called by Tina Jeon of Yale. She needed a ride from St. Louis to Sparta and we agreed. So we are currently a gang of 8 instead of 7. She has agreed to hang out with us for at least one more day, don't know yet if we've scared her enough to get rid of her, but we are trying hard. She however is much too nice and forgiving.

They say that in a small town you can see everyone at the Wal-mart. I keep running into the tournament director at Wal-mart. Very nice people at the Wal-mart here. Very friendly.

We had dinner at Tequila's Mexican Restaurant. Not as good as the restaurants in Texas, but it was OK. The salsa was mostly tomato sauce with not much flavor or burn, but the beans and rice were good. I hear too many people say they won't eat at a Mexican restaurant that isn't near the border, well they are right if what they want is what you get on the border. This wasn't exactly like a Texas restaurant, but is was still good food.

Elissa is very excited. And if you know her you are probably not surprised.

Holly is short.

Ryan ate everyone's leftovers at dinner.

The Aggies showed up while we were at Wal-Mart. They drove up from College Station. They were still unloading their vehicles when I noticed that they had already stolen the magnetic Longhorn decals off the van we had left behind. I ran around looking for them and rescued them. The Aggies had taken them and put them on one of their own vans upside down. I took them back and taped them to the inside window of my van. In the morning we'll tape the other set to the inside of the other van.

I didn't take any photos today so I have none to upload. The guys have all gone to bed so I'll see about getting photos from Elissa and Holly in the morning. The plan for tomorrow is sleep late, eat at Subway, and head for practice at noon. Opening ceremonies are at 4pm. I will upload photos of the ceremony.

OK, I think that is good for now. My apologies for grammar and spelling mistakes. I don't have a good editor and I'm a lousy editor.

James Corral - 05/16/2007 11:45pm

Day 1 Photos

Airport Lunch of Salt Lick and Mangia Pizza	It's an iPod world; Ryan is listening to his iPod Shuffle while playing Suduko on James' iPod Video
	Ever so expressive :-)
8 people on an across the street trip to Wal-Mart in a 7 passenger van.		Mexican dinner

Day 2 Practice and Opening Ceremonies (05/17/2007)

Thursday morning and we did nothing but lay around. At about 11am we went to lunch at nice quite little Subway. Then a bit later the JMU bus pulled up and unloaded, prompting the single Subway employee to call for back up. Glad we got there first.

Now on to the field. Practice was suppose to start at noon. It started sometime around 1:45pm if I remember right. They had some unexpected delays in being able to set up the field. Oh yea, the field. It's on a skeet shooting range. It's not quite long enough to shot 90m so the archers are actually standing in the parking lot. There are concrete pathways in various places by the targets so a miss might mean hitting concrete and watching the arrow skip off over a shallow gully and into a field littered with clay target debris. It's very crunchy under foot. Thankfully none of our guys have experienced the art of shooting concrete yet. I'll post some photos and I'm sure Ron will have a lot more up on the TSAA site soon.

Actually practice was very difficult. First it was windy. There was a strong gusting wind out of the north/north east. Everyone's arrows were hitting a little lower than usual. Second difficulty were the crowds. As soon as half the field was ready for shooting they opened it up for practice. At first they only had 70 and 90 meter distances set up. Then they moved some targets up but it was several ends before the targets at 50 and 30 were changed to the correct target size. Since there were so few targets at each distance some target butts saw 7 archers shooting on them. They were timing two 4 minute ends, but there was actually multiple "lines" as the archers themselves would shoot a few arrows then quickly come off the line so that some one else might have a chance to practice. The second half of the field was finished but never opened to shooting.

We had the usual opening ceremonies. This year we brought along a flag that was given to me by Beau and Megan, thanks guys.

After the ceremonies we went to the other side of town and ate at Southsouth BBQ. The food and atmosphere were great, but it was more steak house then BBQ joint. And there was a quick trip to the Dairy Queen. Now we just need to sleep and get ready for an 8am shooting time and hope that the field is 100% ready.

Some photos.

Planting the Flag	Yes, we really are shooting from a parking lot.
Bob Ryder of JMU showing fashion taste.	That thing on wheels is suppose to be a judge's seat. But the judges aren't using them.	Check out the perch they have for Jack M.
Look for the gaps.
Our girls plus Tina.	Not all the target butts are like this, they do have some whitetail butts. But these are interesting.
The wind on practice day made Elissa unhappy.	Quick meeting!	This is the first shooting day. Once again look for the gaps.
And the big gap between the women and the men.		And we had some unusual clipboards.

Third Day, First scoring day (05/18/2007)

The last four photos above are actually shooting day photos. One thing I failed to mention earlier was the gaps in the field. There are concrete "bunkers" (not sure what to call them I'm not a trap/skeet shooter), trees, and poles that the field needed to avoid. So the targets have random gaps that make the field very very wide. I can take almost 2 minutes to walk from one side of the field to the other.

Well, every one did OK today. No lost arrows and everyone did about as well as expected if not as well as hoped. Everyone is in good spirits if for no other reason than their shooting today was better than their shooting on the practice day. Of course today the wind was not as bad. It was very cool in the morning, but manageable.

Lunch today was going to be at Carmichael's but it turned out to be too fancy for us. So we went to a little Pizza and Pasta place. Now we're just waiting for the cookout and the coaches meeting.

Ron has posted photographs on the TSAA web site.

Apologies for the late posting but I had some internet access problems. But you are now up to day.

James Corral 05/18/2007 4:45pm

Forth, Fifth, and Sixth days (05/19/2007 - 05/21/2007)

Well I would have uploaded more often and more entries except that our computer account was shut down over the weekend. Either we failed to activate it for the summer or for the first time we had to activate it for the summer. Which ever it was, we will fix it.

It's May 22nd as I am typing this, the lack of account access frustrated me and decided to just make one last final entry once we got back and fixed the access problem. So here we go!

Saturday morning we shot the short distances of the FITA. Ryan and David were "stuck" on one of the last two bales of the field. These three were just beyond a rather wide gap and left the six archers on these bales rather isolated. With two practice ends left a judge decided to take pity on them and FORCED them to move the targets over next to the rest of the targets despite the lack of marks to position the target stands. We probably could have fit in at least one more practice end if they had not wasted time moving the bales. One more glitch in a long list.

Saturday afternoon we shot the team round. We only had a women's recurve team this year composed of Lindsey, Holly, and Elissa. With Lindsey shooting injured (and a twenty pound bow) we weren't expecting to survive past the first round and we didn't. We shot against Columbia who went on to win second place.

Saturday we had "hoped" to be eliminated early and head out to St. Louis for sightseeing and a movie. But because of delays in finishing the morning scoring, and delays in starting the team round we weren't eliminated until 4pm. So no going to St. Louis. We did drive forty minutes to the closest movie theater (the one in town was closed) to see Shrek. It was a good show and a fun drive. But I'm glad we live in a city with lots of movie options within less than a forty minute drive. Ryan ate too many burgers at Dairy Queen for a normal human being.

An Aggie once again stole one of our longhorn magnets. But then another one returned it. Ah Aggies, we love them. And incase anyone is wondering; the Aggies are our rivals but foremost they are our friends and while we pick on each other on occasion it is done in fun and with respect.

Sunday was the Olympic Round (AKA the OR, AKA elimination round.) Only Lindsey lasted into the second round. We didn't have a very strong team this year, but we will get better. One sad note, Elissa lost one arrow during this round and it has been sadly donated to the state of Illinois as we could not find it.

Holly, Elissa and I did spend a little bit of time at the only "tourist" destination in Sparta, Illinois the The Misselhorn Art Gallery. It is small, but if you are into art or the movie "In the Heat of the Night" then it is the place to visit. I love the movie so I had to go.

Sunday evening was the banquet. Lots of awards and free food. I will have to say that of all the glitches at this tournament the food was not one of them. Most of the time the food is simple and limited, but this was not and it was slap-your-coach good; unless you are a vegetarian of which we had none on the team this year.

Monday morning we got up early so that we could have a bit of time in St. Louis to visit the Gateway Arch. Which we did. We had fun looking that the exhibits, buying tourist "crap" and riding to the top of the Arch. Look for the photos.

This USIAC will be rembered for all the things that went wrong or were not quite right. I have not even covered half of the glitches that occured with this year's tournament. But while it would be easy to condem the folks that put this shoot on I won't. While they were out of thier element, they were working hard to make this tournament work. And there were a lot of people that stepped up at the last minute to help things out. In the end we were able to shoot and it was fair to all the archers.

And now we are home. We are resting and thinking about next year. There is always next year and there is always the potential to get better.

James Corral - 05/22/2007