How a weekend of live-scored archery across the country came to be
This year marks twenty years of the current format of Archery Australia’s National Indoor Championships. It has grown into one of the biggest events on the archery calendar, and 2026 has brought in 960 entries, so it is still growing.
With this year’s National Indoors just over two weeks away, let’s look back at how it started.
The way it used to be
The old National Indoor was held at a single venue each year, over a weekend. It attracted about 100 participants, mostly from the home state, and each day was a World Archery 18 metre round. It was a good event, but it stayed small, and it never really reached archers beyond the state that was hosting it.
Making the change
Three archers, Marcus Anear, Clare Barnes and James Park, were not happy with the old format or the small numbers. With help from Jim Larven, the AA CEO at the time, they initiated a trial of a multi-venue format instead. The idea was simple: run the championship on the same weekend right across Australia, at venues in every state, with scores shared live between them.
They split the work. Marcus built the software that ran it all. Clare managed the correspondence. James put in a great deal of effort working with the Board and the Regional Governing Bodies, and then organised the medals out of the AA office. Between them they got the RGBs enthused and the first event off the ground.
Year one was 2006, and numbers jumped straight to over 600 participants. Within a couple of years the event was seeing 700 to 800. The format was tweaked over those first few seasons as the organisers worked out what worked best, and Archer’s Diary took over the systems in due course.
It is believed to be the first time anywhere in the world it had been done this way: multi-venue, run over a single weekend, with live scores.
Live scoring, before the smartphone
This was pre-iPhone, and having results online during an event was rare. Coordinating every state to enter scores as archers shot, and pushing those results out live, was a big job. At the Twin City Indoor venue, screens showed scores from across the whole country as the event happened.
There was plenty to make it worth watching from home too. A projector-displayed leaderboard, and results sorted by average so the standings gave an accurate picture of how people were tracking during the event rather than just a running total. Live record tracking meant the results showed the moment a record was broken.
The Vegas round
The Vegas round was in from the start, because the organisers knew it would draw people. It has some nice features: each end starts on the lower targets to avoid arrow shadows, and archers have a choice of the triangular three-spot target faces or the 40cm ten-ring face. At the halfway mark the target faces are swapped, top to bottom and bottom to top. It gave the event a bit of character that set it apart from the old single-venue days.
What it became
For a lot of archers, the National Indoor was their first taste of competition. That was part of the point.
Rob Fiddyment, the current chair of the Archery Australia Board, put the sentiment well:
“We have a great history of innovation and forward thinking as a community based sporting organisation, and as things become more complex year on year it’s great to be reminded of the solid foundations of Archery Australia that will outlive us all.”
Twenty years on, with 960 entries this year, those foundations are holding up nicely. James Park, one of the three who started it, is not only still on the Archery Australia board but is also still shooting in the comp.
Be part of the next twenty years
The 2026 National Indoor Championships run the same way the first one did in 2006: one weekend, venues across the country, live scores. It is bigger than ever. To find out more about the event, see the event page here
