 | Tina Jeon takes aim on the shooting range. |
When she casts her eye on her target, Yale freshman Tina Jeon is a dynamo, placing her arrows with precision.
Knowing of her skill, her suitemates in Vanderbilt Hall sometimes flinch when Jeon takes out her bow. The champion archer assures them that she will not take aim in their presence.
Jeon, who has won regional and national archery competitions, admits that she is hesitant about taking out her archery equipment in public spaces for fear of frightening people. She does most of her practicing at an indoor range in Manchester, Connecticut, where she trains with Olympic medalist Butch Johnson, known among archers as "The Legend."
While the sight of Jeon with her bow can be intimidating to some, the Yale student sees archery as both a sport and an art.
"I find the sport mentally and physically challenging, and visually beautiful," says Jeon.
The freshman -- who hails from Enfield, Connecticut -- first took up archery as a young teenager, when her brother told her not to disparage his scores in the sport until she had tried it herself. Then a devoted figure skater with an East Coast championship title, Jeon decided to try archery once she had completed her contests on ice.
Jeon accompanied her brother to the Manchester range, the largest indoor archery venue in New England. She quickly won second place in a competition with other girls her age, and the range instructors encouraged her to continue practicing the sport. Only a few months later, Jeon made her first trip to a national competition, and won first place in a division for girls under the age of 15.
While at the private Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut, Jeon continued to improve her archery skills, taking the sport as independent study for gym credits. Although she had no consistent formal lessons, in 2001 she won first place in two Junior Olympic Recurve Division competitions: the New England Outdoor Championships and the National Indoor Target Archery Championships.
Also a track-and-field athlete at Loomis Chaffee, Jeon became increasingly enthusiastic about archery. She went to the range whenever she could, practicing shooting by herself and observing the other archers. In her senior year, she caught the attention of Butch Johnson, a four-time Olympian who has won both gold and silver team medals.
Johnson began coaching Jeon in preparation for her fourth national indoor competition. After her first-place win in the junior division in the nationals, Jeon secured second- and fourth-place finishes in the next two years, respectively, and Johnson attributed her slip to a faulty shooting form.
"My shoulder was messed up from shooting in the wrong position," Jeon acknowledges. "Instead of working with my own 34-pound bow, he had me shoot for two months with a rented 25-pound wooden bow to develop the right muscles. He wouldn't let me shoot at a target.
"Finally, about two weeks before the actual competition, Butch let me go back to my usual bow. It was so heavy I just wanted to quit. But I stuck with it."
At the competition, the Connecticut State Indoor Championships, Jeon earned two scores that could have qualified her for the Junior World Team in archery. She came in first in the junior division (18 years of age and under) and second in the senior division (18 and over).
"My scores jumped an average of 40 points because of that training," says Jeon.
The Yale freshman is currently ranked fourth in the nation in the junior division and sixth in the senior division. She says that her increasing precision in shooting at targets is gratifying.
"Shooting my bow makes me feel powerful in the sense that I'm in complete control of my performance," says the Yale student. "When I'm able to execute my shots with fluidity of motion and with strength as well as grace, it feels amazing. Even without looking to see where you hit, you can definitely tell when you've shot a good arrow."
While archery can be an expensive sport (a good bow-and-arrow set can cost, at minimum, in the low thousands, Jeon notes), the champion archer is intent on encouraging other Yale students to take up the sport.
During her first semester on campus, she lobbied the Athletics Department to make archery a club sport, and even drummed up some financial support from alumni archers and archery fans.
Since the group formed, about a dozen undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral students have been making periodic trips with Jeon to the Manchester archery range, and the team is now allowed to practice in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium. There are only a few universities in the nation at which archery is a varsity sport, notes the freshman.
"Archery is a sport where you can shoot all day alone in a cornfield, but for me, it's nice to have people I can do it with," says Jeon. "I'm excited that I was able to make it a club sport. Now we are trying to get some equipment."
The Yale student, who also has a black belt in tae kwon do, says she is currently working at improving her outdoor shooting -- although she considers herself better as an indoor archer. However, she has still placed among the top 10 in the three outdoor tournaments -- including two Nationals -- in which she competed.
Jeon is also considering trying out for the 2008 Olympics, which will be her coach's final Olympic competition.
"My coach wants us to go there together," says Jeon. "The timing is pretty bad, because the Olympics take place right after I will graduate from Yale. A lot of people who compete in them are not in school: They spend seven or eight hours a day just shooting. So it would be a huge challenge for me."
In the meantime, Jeon says that she is savoring her time at the University, where she is also involved with Korean American Students at Yale and is considering a major in the humanities.
Whether or not she ends up at the Olympics, Jeon says she would like to emulate "The Legend's" Olympian form.
"Having watched my coach's nearly flawless form shoot arrow after arrow with such consistency and perfection, I love trying to imitate his technique," says Jeon. "It's like he was born with a bow in his hand."
-- By Susan Gonzalez
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