Archers of Warrnambool holds its first ever club championship

AOW held its first ever club championship after years of hard work building the club.

"It's seriously something I've been dreaming about since when I first came down to the club back in 2013/14 and we had four members," he said.

"The club's grown and we've never had the level of members in archery terms to have a competition (until now).

"Over the years, we've grown. A couple years ago, we had something like 69 or 70 members. This year because of COVID, we're down to about 50 or 51. Last year we had 65.

"The members have developed to a really good level and they travel around to places like Hamilton and Geelong."

The championship began with seniors in the morning followed by juniors and the novice class in the afternoon.

The seniors were shooting at ranges between 30 and 60 metres.

While Saturday was an intra-club event, Clark said the next step was to have inter-club battles at Lake Gillear.

"Our next idea is to invite other clubs down so we can start putting competitions on," he said.

Clark noted AOW had an impressive facility.

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There's a 20-metre indoor range, 90-metre outdoor range and a recently-built outdoor field course.

The club had been building toward serious competition with a Friday social league.

"The league suddenly got people to focus and as soon as people focus at any sport, from table tennis to anything, as soon as you get a league involved people start to take it seriously," Clark said.

"That's what that did and that got people used to shooting against someone else."

The club has been striving to promote participation the past four years and this month is no exception.

AOW reintroduced its ArchAngels program as part of the South West Games this week. It's a free come and try event for women on Wednesday nights for the next two weeks.

"There's been an effort among a lot of members to do the come and trys, we've been trying to encourage a lot more women into the sport," Clark said.

"We've got a grant for the ThisGirlCan from the state government and community grants locally."

The club recently completed its 24-target field course and has introduced shoots on the second Saturday of every month. It's much like a golf course with different distances between the targets.

Member David Reid, who helped drive the project, feels the course could be used for some of the nation's biggest events.

"We'll run a few events, just from the club perspective and we'd like some of the other archery clubs in the district to come and shoot the course and we'll get some response from them," he said.

"Then we're hoping to approach Archery Australia to run either a state or national title on the course.

"Certainly the quality of course, given the other courses I've shot, it'd be one of the most challenging courses in Victoria.

"Just given its layout and the ground it's on at the moment."

Reid praised the sponsors who helped provide the materials to build the course as well as club members who chipped in behind-the-scenes.

He said the club would have its first competition in December and invite the likes of Hamilton, Mount Clay, Bacchus Marsh and Ballarat.

"Then probably early next year, we'll look at running some set competitions from a state or national level through Archery Australia," he said.

"That's what's really exciting is that we can now get archers from all over Australia to come and compete."

Reid won the Open Canberra - distances 60m, 50m, 40m - compound bow category on Saturday with 789 ahead of Lex Nesic on 770. Gerard Ivander took out the recurve bow category with 592.

Denise Burrell triumphed in the Short Canberra - 50m, 40m, 30m - recurve bow competition with 679. Mick Austin was runner-up with 634.

Dilina Sanarath won the novice recurve bow event with 545 ahead of Ben Andrews on 462.

Riley Austin had success in the junior compound bow with 530 ahead of Hamish Allsop on 286.

Jazper Simms won the junior recurve bow with 339, edging out runner up Jayavi Senarath on 336.

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