Gorham High School sophomore Kendal Nicely helped the United States take first place in the Team Cadet Compound Women event at the Junior World Championships held Oct. 15-21, in Merida, Mexico.

Nicely finished fourth in the Individual Cadet Compound Women event.

“Impressive,” said her father, Matt Nicely. “From the first of the year until this thing ended it has been a whirlwind of improvement. She did well; just a little bad luck. Fourth is very good.”

In the individual event Nicely was hindered by a defective arrow on her first shot of the semifinal round. She scored six points out of a possible 10 on the shot, far below her standard.

“It was a really good shot,” she said. “I was expecting it to be a 10. I looked at the arrow after…the vein (plastic feather) was bent.”

Nicely typically scores nine or 10 points with her shots. She considers eights to be sub-par. The teen has said in the past that her sport is more mental than physical and she takes pride in her mental preparation.

And mental toughness is exactly what she needed to overcome that first shot.

“I stood there for a minute,” said Nicely. “I was really mad. I looked back at my dad to see if I did something wrong and he didn’t know.

“I pulled the second arrow back when I was still mad, which was a bad idea – I couldn’t help it. I said to myself ‘If I want to make it close to winning, I have to do my best.'”

Although Nicely recovered well from the early misfortunes, she fell in the match to Anastasia Anastasio of Italy, 114-112.

For Nicely it’s hard not to wonder what could have been.

“I would have probably shot one of my best scores,” she said. “I still got a 112, which isn’t that bad. All my other arrows were really good.

“I could have easily gone into the gold-medal match.”

Nicely advanced to the semifinals by finishing third out of 23 archers in the qualifying round, scoring 1341 points with 144 arrows.

She received a bye in the round of 16 competitors. Then in the second round of the single-elimination tournament, she defeated Candace McIntosh of Canada, 110-102, and in the quaterfinals she beat Panama’s Joanne Nicole Sanchez, 113-101.

Nicely fell in the bronze-medal match, 114-113, to Lucy O’Sullivan of Great Britain.

She had befriended O’Sullivan and several other archers during her stay in Mexico, which helped make the defeat easier to accept.

“I had two-point lead and then maybe a one-point lead and then I shot an eight. I think I didn’t compensate for the wind. She won by one point.

“It would have been worse if I didn’t like the person.”

In the 23 elimination matches there were only two scores of 114 – both defeated Nicely.

In the team event Nicely was joined by Elissa Falconer (Oakdale, Pa.) and Amber Christensen (Preston, Idaho).

She shot third in each round for the United States team, a spot typically reserved for the strongest and fastest of the team’s three shooters. The team event is timed, putting the third shooter under additional pressure.

And in the semifinals against host Mexico, Nicely felt plenty of pressure.

“Elissa went up to shoot; she took a long time,” said Nicely. The other girl (Christensen) went up and she couldn’t get a release off; she took a long time, too. By the time I got up I had 15 seconds to shoot two arrows.”

It usually takes Nicely 15 seconds to shoot one arrow.

“I had difficulty starting but I figured it out,” she said. “When I pulled back my arrow, my peep (sight) was turned. I could see the target but it wasn’t clear. My first shot was an eight.”

Nicely had four seconds remaining to take her final shot. She later found out she needed to score a nine or a 10 to advance her team to the gold-medal round.

“I pulled it back and just shot because I just had to,” she said. “My arrow went off with one second left. It would have been counted as a zero if time ran out. My teammates were screaming. I didn’t know what I got – everyone was screaming.

“It was probably the scariest thing I have ever done.”

Fear or no fear, Nicely scored a perfect 10, advancing her team to the finals where they defeated Great Britain, 220-218.

“I was shaking,” she said. “Everyone was laughing at me.”

Outside of competition, Nicely enjoyed meeting archers from around the world, learning about other cultures and discovering how different the same language can be.

“They call the elevator the ‘lift,'” she said, referring to the team from Great Britain. “The one I like; they call bangs ‘fringe.’ They call really rich, ‘posh’ and French fries ‘chips.’ There were a ton of different things.”