David Lu shot his first arrow two years ago—the day before he entered his first archery tournament. The Stanford sophomore didn’t medal in the competition, but he did place fourth—in a field of 12-year-olds with comparable skills.
Today Lu is a senior and veteran on the Stanford team that was ranked third in the nation at last spring’s U.S. Intercollegiate Archery Championship. He jokes that he’s double majoring in mechanical engineering and arrow-finding. “If you miss a target, your arrow can really burrow into the grass,” Lu says.
Perhaps that’s why feathered fletchings come in Day-Glo shades of orange, pink, green and yellow. Costing between $1.25 and $50 apiece, today’s slipstream-sleek arrows have aluminum shafts coated with carbon. And they’re fixable, even in the middle of a tournament. Lose an arrow point? Fire up a portable propane blowtorch and reattach it with hot glue.
Just don’t get carried away with too much flight-corrective bling-bling. “If you put a lot on an arrow, you’re defeating the purpose of having a nice, light arrow that flies to the target,” coach Sheri Rhodes explains.
Rhodes, who guided the United States women’s archery team at the Athens Olympics, was a huge factor in the Cardinal’s unprecedented showing at the nationals. She coached at Arizona State for 17 years before deciding last year to make the twice-weekly commute to the Farm from her home in Sacramento. “These are people who are enthusiastic and dedicated,” Rhodes says about the Cardinal archers, who practice on a shooting range at El Camino Real and Serra Street. “I get to live vicariously through them.”
Archery is more about brains than brawn, according to Rhodes. “You need to develop mental tricks or skills to be a top competitive archer, like programming yourself to shoot the next arrow without regard for where the last one went.”
Thanks to Rhodes’s expertise, the men’s squad walked away with the bronze at nationals, sophomore Sandra Tyan took home an individual All-American title, and Rookie of the Year honors went to junior Kevin Ju. Not bad for a club team that was formed in 2002 and competes with long-standing varsity programs, such as Texas A&M and James Madison University. Although founding member Keith Coleman, ’02, has been competing since he was 16, most of the 20 women and men on the Stanford squad had never picked up a bow before a friend dragged them to a practice session. Many say they heard about the team from classmates in science and engineering courses. “We probably have a disproportionate number of mechanical engineering majors,” Coleman says. “It definitely has a gadget appeal.”
This is not Robin Hood’s bow. Today’s elegant recurve bows are no longer made of wood, but configured with layers of laminated carbon and fiberglass. A device on the bow determines the stiffness and tension of the string, and archers take aim through a sight with crosshairs. Compound bows come with magnifying and leveling devices in their sights, plus built-in stabilizers that act like shock absorbers. Sweetest of all would have to be the “kisser button” on the string that aligns with the archer’s lips when the bowstring is fully drawn and ready to shoot.
If the team has a nerdy rep, that’s okay with members. They bring their favorite board game—Taboo—on the road when they travel. At the nationals in Harrisonburg, Va., Cardinal archers shied away from local bars in favor of a monster parking lot. “There was a Super Wal-Mart and we piled into shopping carts and had races all night,” says Helen Cheng, ’04, a past president of the team.
Each summer, team members coach the weeklong Junior Olympic Archery Program for Bay Area kids to raise funds for equipment and travel, and they practice six days a week during the academic year. They now have their crosshairs fixed on California’s State Indoor Archery Championships and the U.S. Intercollegiate Archery Championships in Georgia.
