Life after university won’t be changing too much for freshly minted Aussie champion Amber Reinbott - there’ll still be plenty of number-crunching between now and the LA Olympics as she tries to master a new discipline in archery and chase the qualifying score she needs to earn a spot on the Australian team.
Reinbott graduates from Bond University with a Bachelor of Actuarial Science next week, but her next challenge won’t be in a finance firm.
She has already been accepted into the Australian Defence Force and will begin her Air Force training in March.
Between now and then, she’ll be shooting between 30 and 80 arrows a day as she transitions into compound target archery which has just earnt Olympic status for the first time.
Before swapping targets, she reaffirmed her status as one of the country’s most gifted bowhunters when she dominated the National 3DAAA Championships earlier this month.
By the time her quiver was empty Reinbott had won the Female Bowhunter Open title, smashed two of her own national records by a remarkable 18 points, and posted the highest score of the entire competition, eclipsing even the men’s open divisions.
It was a confidence booster as she transitions into Olympic compound archery that her aim has never been truer.
“I have my eyes set on the Olympics,” she said.
“Having only just returned to compound archery from bowhunting events, I’m trying to get my name out there in that association now that it is an Olympic sport.”
Her immediate benchmark is a score of 690 - widely viewed across the sport as the number that will put an athlete into Olympic consideration. From there, selections will come down to national results and whether Australia secures one of only 12 mixed-team spots for LA.
“It’s expected to be a teams-only event with a male and female shooter firing three arrows each to create a combined score,” she said.
“If I can shoot a 690 I will be considered, then I would have to do the nationals and try to get on the Australian team.
“And only a select number of countries will qualify, so I would have to qualify for Australia, and then hope Australia qualifies.”
She hasn’t reached the 690 mark yet, but there’s important context. Most of her early training has been at blustery club shoots in Toowoomba where the conditions have been “far from ideal to post a score like that”.
To give herself the best shot, she will now move around the state competing in as many regional qualifying QRE events as she can between December and March where she expects to find more controlled environments to improve her scores.
With Olympic compound archery contested at 50 metres on an 80cm target face and bows capped at 27 kilograms with stabilisers and magnified scopes, Reinbott is deep in the process of adapting to a discipline that rewards absolute precision.
It is the same precision that carried her through an Actuarial Science degree, even if she laughs now at the idea of becoming an actuary.
“I definitely decided doing Actuarial Sciences that I don’t want to be an actuary,” she said.
“I majored in data analytics and I’m taking those skills into my new career in the Air Force. I’ve already been accepted, and