Guide · for club admins

How to run an indoor league night

The format decisions that are hard to change later, the half-hour before the first end, and what to do when someone misses a week.

Decide the format before week one

Four decisions shape everything that follows, and all four are painful to change once scores exist. Settle them at the committee meeting, not on the line.

  1. 1

    The round

    Indoor leagues usually shoot a 300 round: 60 arrows at 20 yards, three arrows an end. USA Archery indoor scores 10 down to 1 with X's counted separately for ties; NFAA scores five arrows an end with the X worth 5; a Lancaster round replaces the X with an 11-point inner ring. Pick one and publish it — mixed formats in one standings table are meaningless.

  2. 2

    Handicap, or scratch?

    A handicapped league lets a 250 archer beat a 290 archer on the night, which is what keeps newer members coming back. The usual method is to average an archer's first few weeks, take the gap to a nominal maximum, and award a percentage of it — 80% of the difference from 300 is a common setting. Scratch leagues are simpler and fairer at the top end; club culture decides which matters more.

  3. 3

    How many weeks count

    A ten-week league where only the best eight count forgives one bad night and one absence. Decide the number in advance — it changes how people shoot in week nine.

  4. 4

    Makeups

    If archers can shoot a missed week later, cap it. Two makeups over a season keeps the league honest; unlimited makeups turn it into a postal shoot where the last archer to submit knows exactly what they need.

Setting the line up

  1. 1

    Put people on bales, on paper or on screen

    Four archers to a bale, positions A to D. Fixed positions matter more than they look: everyone learns their order, the line moves at a predictable pace, and a scorer can tell at a glance who has not shot.

  2. 2

    Even the numbers, and spread the experience

    Everyone shoots the end together and walks down together, so the line moves at the pace of the last scorecard to be agreed, not the slowest archer. That makes two things worth balancing: keep the same number of archers on each bale, and make sure every bale has somebody confident enough to run the scoring. A bale of four beginners with no one sure whether that arrow is a 7 or an 8 is what holds up an end.

Running the line

  1. 1

    Score at the bale, in shooting order

    A, then B, then C, then D — the same order the bale shoots. Scoring out of order is where the errors come from, whether the card is paper or a tablet.

  2. 2

    Call arrows highest first

    "Nine, nine, seven" reads back faster than "seven, nine, nine", and it makes an end total easier to check mentally.

  3. 3

    Correct mistakes immediately

    An end entered against the wrong archer is trivial to fix in the first minute and a forensic exercise an hour later. Say something straight away — nobody minds.

Closing the night

  1. 1

    Check for unfinished cards

    Someone always leaves after eight ends. Decide whether that is a partial score or a missed week before you publish, and apply it the same way every time.

  2. 2

    Apply handicaps and drops last

    Raw scores first, then handicap, then drop the lowest weeks. Doing it in any other order produces standings you cannot explain to the person in second place.

  3. 3

    Publish the same night

    Standings emailed while people are still packing up get read. Standings posted three days later get argued with.

How ArcheryScores handles it

Everything above is club practice and works on paper. This is the part the software takes over.

Standings that compute themselves

Handicap percentage, the number of weeks averaged, how many weeks count towards the total, and the makeup allowance are all league settings. Standings recalculate as ends land, so the table at the end of the night is finished when the last arrow is.

Bales and positions

Assign archers to bales and positions, or auto-assign the whole field. Move somebody between bales mid-round and their scores follow them.

The scoreboard on the wall

The live board runs in any browser, or on a Fire TV Stick that comes back to the scoreboard by itself after a power cut. Ends, totals and X counts, updating as they are entered at the bale.

Corrections without archaeology

Any end, any archer, including someone who has already finished — corrected in place, with the standings following. Missed weeks shot later are recorded as makeups and counted against the allowance automatically.

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More reading: every scoring format explained · guides & FAQ