Archery is a quiet sport. All a spectator hears is the whisper of the arrow leaving the bow and the thwack of the arrow striking the target.

Usually the quiet sports are the ones with the most pressure, but UCLA Club Archery doesn’t let it get to them.

The team meets five days a week on secluded Sycamore Field, next to the Southern Regional Library Facility and behind Saxon Suites. The practice field is well-hidden; the club’s website directs interested students down a winding road frequented by maintenance trucks and not much else.

On a gray Sunday afternoon as practice winds down, members of the team laugh together and joke around, trying to distract two students who are competing to hit the same target.

Stanley Cheng, the team’s coach and an alumnus of the club, quietly works with some of the club’s equipment on a folding table that holds everything from sights and apertures – used for more accurate aiming – to bows and arrows.

UCLA Club Archery has been up and running for over nine years, with Cheng in his third year as coach. This year’s team is mostly first-time archers, and includes both men and women.

“Mostly everybody that comes in to the club is new,” Cheng said. “I’d say 95 percent of people who come out here have never done it before.”

The club held its quarterly New Archer Week at the beginning of the academic year, offering free lessons to anybody who was interested. The club also offers a month-long series of weekly classes on proper shooting technique and form. The classes are open only to club members, and they are $15 cheaper than the ones offered by UCLA Recreation. All that is required to join the club is a quarterly fee of $20, and the club provides bows, though some students bring their own.

“There’s also no pressure to compete. Those people who want to compete can, but a lot of people shoot recreationally,” Cheng said.

The team recently participated in an exhibition tournament at Biola University. The archery clubs from Loyola Marymount University and USC participated as well.

Fourth-year engineering student Daniel Chen has been shooting for four years and competed in the Biola tournament.

“It was pretty relaxed for a tournament, so it was pretty good experience for our new archers,” Chen said.

“The tournament went well,” Cheng said. “A lot of people had never gone to a tournament before so it was good experience.

Everybody had fun, and I think we came away with a few awards.”

But not everybody comes to UCLA Club Archery without a background in the sport.

“I got interested in archery a long time ago,” said Lensar Dere, a fourth-year history student who has been in the club for over a year. “I read a lot of books, so I like the history of it. It’s pretty relaxing too.”

The majority of members shoot with recurve bows, which have tips that curve away from the shooter when unstrung.

Recurve bows have few moving parts and require the shooter to do the majority of the work, while compound bows offer magnified sights and some mechanical assistance in the form of pulleys that allow a higher velocity shot.

“The recurve bow is what most people use here, since that’s the type they use in the Olympics,” Cheng said.

Dere, on the other hand, prefers a compound bow.

“The compound side (of tournaments) is really laid-back, people are just standing there cracking jokes and shooting,” Dere said.
“Recurve is a little more serious, you don’t hear them talk.”

The team competes in a series of regional tournaments every year, and goes on to a western regional and eventually a national tournament that the team sends some shooters to on occasion.

“There’s no real qualification in terms of going to a tournament, so if you want to go you can go,” Cheng said. “Team-wise in the west region last year, we came in third for men’s compound and second for men’s regional.”

The club will hold another New Archer Week in winter quarter, and encourages interested students to come out and give it a shot.

“Pretty much anybody can do archery,” Cheng said. “I’ve seen people without arms do archery, I’ve seen people who are blind do archery. It’s really accessible to a lot of different people. And it’s fun.”