The Alberta Winter Games are not for another few months but the Lakeland Archers archery club is getting a head start on the team to represent the Northeastern Zone at the provincial games.
The club hosted zone a tryout on Sunday, Dec. 4.
The tryouts saw archers from all over Zone 7 taking shots at the targets. Some came to Lac La Biche from Provost and Lloydminister, others from St. Paul, Bonnyville and Cold Lake.
The Winter Games are held for youth ages 12 to 17. The games are set for Feb. 10 to Feb. 12, and will have eight young archers representing Zone 7 from various types of shooting styles and the two age groups.
A member of the ‘cub’ category is someone 12 to 14 years-old. ‘Cadets’ are competitors 15 to 17.
Once the scores were tabulated, the archers who will representing Zone 7 are Opal Suhan and Eric Sprecker from Lac La Biche in the cub recurve category; Cyenne Glynn and Tristan Hanson from Lloydminster competing in the cub compound category; Meagan Adam and Travis Rendle, also from Lloyd, will be shooting for cadet recurve; lastly, River McDonald from Lac La Biche and Austin Glynn again from the Border City will be hitting targets in the cadet compound category.
Because the majority of the category winners are from Lloydminster, it is a possibility that Schaub might try to hold some practices in the city or another convenient place for all the winners.
“We will have to have a few practices in January and we will try to centralize it as much as possible,” Schaub noted.
Zone 7 has one of the largest amounts of young archers in the province. This was evident in the amount of people that came out to shoot.
“Calgary tryouts were [Saturday, Dec. 3] and they held tryouts for Zone 2 and Zone 3 and only had 25 people come out from both zones. We have 28 kids trying out here just from Zone 7,” said President and head coach Rene Schaub.
In addition to the eight archers making their way to the Games representing Zone 7, other zones, such as Calgary, have many open positions left for alternates.
“What happens as an alternate is the points scored go towards the zone that you are shooting for but [the archers] will be wearing colours from the zone that they are actually from,” Schaub said. “If they win a medal it’s theirs to keep and the zone that they are from still gets recognition.”
The Winter Games are taking place in various communities throughout the province depending on the sport. For archery, the competition is being held in Spruce Grove at St. Thomas Aquinas School.
Schaub was very pleased with how the zone qualifiers in Lac La Biche went. And while he would have liked to see more representation from his own club, the avid archer is happy to see the interest the sport is receiving from across the region.
“Everyone did a fantastic job today,” Schaub said when talking to the winners after the event at the first unofficial team meeting of the Zone 7 team.
He gave the team a quick pep talk as well.
“If you practice standing up at the line alone, focus and concentrate and take your time, we can do well no matter what.”
