Royal Round

If you have absolutely zero interest in archery, feel free to ignore this post.  This has been a public service announcement.  Thank you.

Sundays are our archery practice days.  We spend two hours to try to shoot our arrows into a target anywhere from 20 yards to 40 yards away.

Today we did something called a "Royal Round" which is the scoring technique used by the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) to rank all archers.

Yes, I'm one of "those" people.  We'll discuss that in another post.  But for now, roll with me here.

Here's how it works.  You shoot 6 arrows from 40 yards.  6 arrows from 30 yards.  And 6 arrows from 20 yards.  Then you shoot a "speed round" where you try to shoot as many arrows as you can in 30 seconds from 20 yards.  You add up your scores from each range (40, 30, 20 and the 20 yard speed round) to determine what your first "round" scores are.  You do this three times total, then take the average of the three scores.  What the average score is, determines where you rank.  Did you follow all of that? Anyone? Anyone?

This is what our targets look like.  For the white rings, you get 1 point.  For the  black rings you get 2 points.  Blue rings are 3 points.  Red rings are 4 points. And finally the gold rings are 5 points.  No extra points are awarded for getting a true bullseye, but man is it cool! 

The Hubs looks so hot when he's doing archery.  Why is that?

So, we did our first of three rounds today in practice.  I scored a 37.  The Hubs, of course, in his complete awesomeness, scored a 52.  If we were to assume those numbers were the averages from three rounds, The Hubs would be a Yeoman and I would be a Bowman.  For reference, our instructor is a Yeoman.  Not too shabby for our first round.

Score Rank
0 - 24 Novice
25 - 44 Bowman
45 - 64 Yeoman
65 - 84 Forester
85 - 104 Bowmaster
105+ Royal Bowmaster

Of course, those aren't averages, and we have two more rounds to shoot before we get our final placement.  But so far so good right?  We'll finish up our next two rounds hopefully next weekend.  The best part, once you reach a rank, you can never lose it.  So, if I have a miraculous day and somehow manage to become a Bowmaster, no matter how bad I shoot for the rest of my life, I will always have the title Bowmaster.  And let me tell you, it is a secret dream of mine to shoot that good one day.  Actually, in my dreams, I'm just one of those natural archers who is amazing from day one.  But since we've already proved that dream false, I had to shoot a little lower in my dreaming.

Get it? "Shoot" a little lower? I crack me up!

Seriously.. Thoughts?