Is it starting to sink in yet? From September 2-7, at the Lakeland Archers' Herb Erickson shooting range, the community will host global athletes competing in the World 3D Outdoor Archery Championships.
Try counting all of the countries that will have representatives in our community in less than three weeks.
Uruguay, Uganda, the United States, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland and France and not just Slovakia, but Slovenia too.
The sheer magnitude of being a host location for the World 3D Archery event is amazing. An event like this, being held in Lac La Biche County and hosted by the local Lakeland Archers and an organizing committee whose members most of the area’s resident know on a first-name basis, is unheard of.
The craziness — and coolness — of this community hosting a global stage event smacks you in the face when you look at the events calendar page of the World Archery Association’s website.
Lima, Peru is hosting the Pan American Games archery event, Taipei is holding the 2019 Asia Cup for World Archery, Napoli just had the Summer Universiade World Ranking Event and Berlin was the location for the 2019 Hyundai Archery World Cup in June, Medellin hosted an archery Word Cup event in April, the European Grand Prix 2019 was held in Bucharest in April.
Of those locations, the one with the smallest population is Lima, with just 268,000 people, compared to, let’s say Berlin with 3.75 million or Napoli with 950,000 ... or Lac La Biche County ... with about 10,000 on a busy day.
Wow.
This is pretty cool. But we have to get out there and show them how loud we can be. Volunteer, take part, support. This world stage is huge ... and we need to fill it with everything we’ve got.