April/May Recap 2004

RECAP:

Financial Report: 6 new sponsors came in April and May for a total of $1580. Thank you all so much! I am now up to $14080 in funds raised. Please keep telling others about me!

April/May Recap: I continued to make progress, improving on my previous month’s arrow volume yet again.

Gold Cup Tournament 2004: The last event before the Olympic Trials, I had a less than stellar qualification round placing me 14th out of 45, but I was able to get it together during the elimination rounds and bump myself up 9 spots to 5th place. I also had the third highest elimination round average out of everyone! See below for play by play detail!

National Ranking: Not including my shooting performance at Gold Cup, my 2004 national rolling ranking is 8th place. The last four rankings had me slowly creeping up the scale from 61st to 31st to 21st to 8th!

Extra Adventures: I went to the 2004 McDonald’s Air & Sea show in Fort Lauderdale with Jan and Mark Beggs. Also, I drove 25 hours over four days from Florida to Illinois just in time for mother’s day with Vic’s family, but before I left we had a BBQ at the club in Ft. Lauderdale.

THE FINANCIAL REPORT:

At the end of April an exceptional opportunity came my way. Toll Brothers, a luxury home builder has offered to pay me $50 for every realtor who brings a prospective client into their Castle Pines office – the first two weeks already brought in $550! SO, if you live in Colorado, be sure to go check their product out- make sure to sign a visitor’s card! (Call my Mom, Judy Fahrenkrog with Fuller Towne and Country Properties at 303-888-4760 for more info on how to participate.) Also, keep your eyes open for their full color ads in the paper featuring me shooting.

The past two months, additional sponsors include the Castle Rock Rotary Club, who matched a gift from one of their members, Dave Watts. I was also excited to recently learn that my Aunt Pat and Uncle Skip Jump will be paying for the full cost of my hotel room at the Olympic Trials. More sponsorship came from Ben Heavrin, Les Lilly, The Plouff Family, and Reese and Alberta Johnson, Thanks! For those of you who have given money in the past and I did not specifically mention you in E-newsletters, I apologize – I am learning as I go what people enjoy reading and adding things to make the E-newsletters better. All my sponsors are listed on the Sponsorship Thermometer page. I AM THANKFUL TO EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU!

APRIL/MAY RECAP:

April was my last month in Florida. Although I was sad to leave, I was looking forward to cooler weather. Some of our training days had hit the mid-90s with lots of humidity! As the Olympic Trials get closer, my focus has continually been on shooting more. I upped my arrow volume again by about 16% over March. 85% of my time was dedicated to shooting, 4% of my time to cardio and the remainder was recovery.

May is going well, I’ve already shot the same amount of arrows this year that I did in all of last year! I’ll have more for you in the next E-newsletter.

GOLD CUP TOURNAMENT 2004, May 22-23rd:

(see EXPLANATION OF AN OUTDOOR TOURNAMENT at the bottom of this page if you want more detail about how an outdoor tournament is run)

Bloomfield, NJ – As far as travel goes this was definitely a challenging one. Because of bad weather in Chicago, our original flight from Springfield to O’Hare was delayed, not once but three times and then cancelled. Fortunately we were able to catch a flight to St. Louis and then another one to Newark later that evening. By the time our 15-hour journey had finally ended, it was 3:30am.

Later that morning, Anthony Bellettini, my first coach and the man who got me started in archery picked me up at the hotel and took me to the field. I was lucky that I didn’t have to shoot until 2pm, but the late bedtime certainly played a role in how disoriented I felt during the qualification round. I was really happy to see that the weather was much better than Arizona and Texas, no wind and a lot of sunshine.

As I started the qualification round, I struggled to get my bearings. It was one of those days that you shoot an arrow you think should go in the middle but instead it lands on the right side. You shoot another arrow, now compensating for the reason it went to the right and it pops a left. I started to loose faith in my shooting, and I got confused and forgot how to shoot well and how to bring myself back. My score reflected it with a 561. The exact same score I had shot in Texas, and only 2 points off Arizona. The only difference? New Jersey had ideal weather; Texas and Arizona were plagued with wind!

That night I did a lot of reflecting; I called a few people who I knew I could count on to help me through the experience. No matter what happened, the next day I needed to refocus, forget about the day before and move forward. Unlike my other tournaments, I decided that I didn’t want to lookup who I was going to shot against in the elimination round the following day, what did it matter? If I was shooting well, I knew I could beat most of them. My first match was against the number two Columbia University shooter Nazreen Bakht. Right away I was up a couple of points, on my second end I shot a 55 out of 60, and closed the match with a 50, winning by about 25 points.

My next match was against the number one ranked Canadian, Marie Beaudet. She was fresh from winning the Mexican Grand Prix and was ranked third after the qualification round. I knew she would be tough to beat but there was something inside me that said I could do it if I stayed calm and took smart shots. After the first end I was up a couple of points, on the second end I picked up another point and the third end gave me a win by 10 points. Similar to Arizona, I would find myself in the quarterfinals, this time against another member of the 2003 US World’s Team, Stephanie Miller.

The match started off well, the first arrow I shot a 9, the second arrow a 7. Suddenly my focus shifted from staying relaxed to whether or not I could win if I shot another 7. Time too was running out, only 29 seconds to shoot the last arrow. I over thought the last shot and popped a 6 – so much for that 7 I was so worried about! I would have to recover well to keep a close match. Over the next two ends, I shot a 28 and a 26, both tying Stephanie. Then on the last end I shot a 27 which beat Stephanie’s 25, but wasn’t good enough to win it. I lost by 3 points but had the highest losing score putting me in 5th place overall.

I’m glad I was able to learn something new and in the process prove to myself that I had control over what I was doing.

NATIONAL RANKING:

Although where I am ranked nationally has absolutely no bearing on whether or not I make the Olympic Team, I am proud of what I have been able to accomplish in just less than a year and a half. The rolling rank is determined at different points during the year and is based on the shooter’s top 4 tournament elimination round averages. Early in the year, the rolling ranking was mostly based on the 2003 tournaments, but now the latest ranking only includes tournaments from this year.

At the beginning of this year I was ranked 61st. Many of you believed in me and came forward to sponsor me. During the second round of rankings I moved up to 31st, then in the third round, I moved up another 10 spots to 21st. The most recent ranking has me in 8th and I will most likely move up a couple of spots when Gold Cup is added. I want to thank you all for being there to support me and allowing me to train full time. I know that your commitment to me has helped make this happen!

Thank you so much!

Joy

p.s. For those of you who pray, please keep my quest to make the Olympic team in your prayers. I know it is small in the grand scheme of things, but Philippians 4:6 says, "Don't worry about anything; instead pray about everything." I will continue to keep you in my prayers and ask that you be blessed for helping me when I needed it most.

EXPLANATION OF AN OUTDOOR TOURNAMENT:

This year because it is an Olympic year, the tournaments are run similar to the Olympics. The only distance is 70 meters and the first day is spent shooting 72 arrows – this is called the qualification round. Based on your score (maximum is 10 points per arrow) you are then ranked 1 through 64, if you are 65 or lower you get cut.

The second day is called the OR Round or the Elimination Round. It is basically a bracket that pits the top archers against the weaker archers, i.e. the number one archer has to shoot his/her match against the number 64 archer, while the number 2 archer has to shoot against the number 63 archer. If you win your first match you move on, if you don’t, you’re done. The OR Round is a relatively new format developed for the Olympics in 1996 to make the sport more television friendly, it used to be whoever shot the highest score over four distances would win the gold.

Also, here is the definition of an end, many people weren’t clear what one was in my last E-newsletter – an end is each time you complete a certain number of arrows. For example, in the qualification round we shoot 12 ends of 6 arrows, up until the quarterfinals during the elimination rounds we shoot 3 ends of 6 arrows, and once we are in the quarterfinals, we shoot 4 ends of 3 arrows.