Wednesday, 16 August 2017

Handicap curves from Archers Mate

I've been doing a little work on investigating archery handicaps for Witchford Archers, and it's been a fascinating journey into statistics. The Club Secretary, God-bless-him, has passed me all sorts of facts and figures and I've been looking at the code on the Archer's Mate website. We'd also attended a meeting of the CAA and discovered that working out your Handicap was a useful thing to do (especially if you enter competitions - for me, less so).

On the site, there is a simple form which allows a user to enter the round they are shooting, the type of bow they are using, the type of target they are shooting at, their gender and their score.

I was only really interested in the Portsmouth handicaps, so I was a wee bit of a pain and hit the server with lots and lots of requests (I did it during odd hours, so hopefully it didn't impact things too much).

Anyway, I discovered that the handicaps didn't differ between men and women but that the curve varied between the different bows and targets. I guess the main take away was that the user shooting a compound at a full target started off the same as someone shooting a recurve bow at the same target, as their score increased though, they began to follow the handicaps of those shooting a compound bow at a triple target.

Hopefully, the graph above illustrates what I mean. I'm not going to hit the server anymore, but I think I'll do the same to the handicaps published by Archery GB and see if there's any correlation.

There did seem to be a difference in the classifications between men and women though... not sure what that's all about.

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