Third Time's a Charm: Dykman Going to Greece

Olympic archer Janet Dykman, who has helped coach students enrolled in the archery program at CMC for the past two years, has qualified for the 2004 U.S. Olympic Archery Team. It is her third Olympic Games after placing third in the Olympic archery trials held June 14-19 in Ohio.
Dykman, who is 50, is in Athens this month for the 28th Olympic Games, alongside top-ranked team member Jennifer Nichols, 20, of Cheyenne, Wyo., and Stephanie Arnold, 26, of Portland, Ind.
Since making her first Olympic appearance in 1996, Dykman says she doesn't feel the same pressures she did then. "I just have to pay attention to my game and shoot my shots," she says.
She has assisted associate professor of education Randy Town in the instruction of archery at CMC since the inception of the College's archery program in fall 2002. The Easton Archery Range, made possible by a gift from the late Mary S. Easton, has enrolled dozens of CMC students and students from The Claremont Colleges since the range opened at Claremont Boulevard and Arrow Route. The gift also provides a needs-based scholarship for one archery student per academic year. Dykman's visits to campusas much as twice weekly, and on weekends with advanced studentsare coordinated through the James Easton Sports Foundation.
Dykman qualified for the Olympics despite surgery last November that made it difficult to train consistently, she says. In addition to being a member of the U.S. Olympic team for Games in Atlanta and Sydney, she has received the prestigious Shenk Award (awarded to the male and female archer in the Olympic Bow Division with the highest cumulative scores in the U.S. Indoor, Field and Target Championships for that year), and has earned six gold medals in four Pan American Games.
Dykman says she loves the sport so much that "I sometimes ask myself whether I should be doing other things, instead, but people have always encouraged me to go on." Something she aims to do when she returns to CMC in the fall is assemble a team to compete in the National Collegiate tournament.
"Working with Janet twice a week for the past two years has been great," Town says. "She is such a great resource for our students. Janet's enthusiasm has stimulated the interest of all our students, but in particular, for some of our first-semester students. They have gone to the next level by entering some of the local tournaments in Southern California."
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