Reprinted with permission from The Storm Lake Times Pilot and author.
If the sport you loved wasn’t offered in college, would you take matters into your own hands and start your own conference? Connor Ellinghuysen, Buena Vista University archery head coach, did exactly that as the archery team headed into its fourth which Ellinghuysen has led since its inaugural season.
BVU Archery hosted their home tournament the afternoon of Nov. 2 in the Lamberti Rec Center.
The Beavers were the overall team champion at a tournament for the second time in a row after being the overall team champions at their first tournament at Grandview University. Ten BVU archers managed to make the podium individually in their divisions, bringing home 18 medals in total.
“We hosted a tournament last year on campus too and it was a bit smaller,” Ellinghuysen said. “We kind of doubled the size this year and had about 57 archers that competed.”
BVU hosted Grandview University, Coe College, Alexandria Tech College and Cottey College (women only) at its tournament. All four of those teams, including BVU, have joined together to form the River Valley Archery Conference — named by Lee Hauser, a senior on the BVU team.
“We’ve been discussing a framework of what would a college archery conference [look like] and what would the format look like,” Ellinghuysen said. “[We] came together and said, we’re going to kind of have a circuit of schools [host tournaments].”
The conference hopes to add more schools and has already reached out to other Midwest schools such as Mount Marty University, Missouri Valley College and the University of North Dakota.
Archery isn’t a NCAA sanctioned sport, which has made it difficult for the BVU archery program to compete against other collegiate teams in the past, Ellinghuysen noted.
He added how in their past seasons the program has had to attend “open” tournaments where anyone who is affiliated with USA Archery or the National Field Archery Associate is allowed.
“There’s not always college divisions [at open tournaments],” Ellinghuysen said. “Some of the bigger shoots that we go to have college divisions but again, it’s a wide age range.”
The tournament hosted by BVU was only a college division and offered more shooting divisions for archers. At open archery tournaments archers are only allowed to shoot from 30 to 60 arrows—at the BVU tournament archers shot a total 300 arrows at least, according to Ellinghuysen. He added at their tournament after an archer shot 300 arrows, they could qualify for an elimination round where they will go head-to-head with other archers in their division.
Ellinghuysen noted since the college tournaments there has been a “huge outpouring of the archer community, of how excited they are to see college archery growing.”
“You see recruits that are now like, ‘oh man I can really do college archery’,” Ellinghuysen said. “It’s just gotten me excited for the future of archery because it’s more accessible to students.”
Lee Houser, a senior on the BVU archery team, was the first transfer student to join the program according to Ellinghuysen. Houser said his freshman year he attended Iowa Western Community College his freshman year before transferring to BVU.
“[My high school archery coach] told me there’s this program up at BV and I let him know I was interested,” Houser said. “And then Connor got a hold of me, and we talked about what it would be like to be on the team [and other logistics].”
BVU Archery will travel to Des Moines for the Iowa Pro AM tournament from Dec. 19-21 as they aim to continue their hot streak.
