Sydney Sullenberger ’26 Is Back on Target

When archer Sydney Sullenberger ’26 fired her last arrow at the World Archery Youth Championships, in July 2023 in Limerick, Ireland, she didn’t know how close she was to winning gold.

The drenching rain that had fallen on and off for days had stopped, but the wind was high. Banners whipped and flags snapped; the athletes’ shirts rippled. Sullenberger was representing the United States in the under-21 bracket against top-seeded Hazal Burun of Turkey. Fifty meters from the shooting line, two targets waited.

It was Sullenberger’s first time in the finals of an international event — an added pressure on top of the weather conditions — but her approach was the same as always. One arrow at a time. Block out the outside world. Be still. Be steady. “I was not paying attention to the score,” she says. “I was in such a zone of trying to keep myself as calm as possible, regulate that heart rate. Just keep it to me and the bow.”

And she did. Thwack.

The arrow struck red — several rings out from the target’s center, but true enough to push Sullenberger’s score past Burun’s by 2 points, 140–138. She had no idea. “I turned around and looked at the coach, and he said, ‘You did it,’” she recalled. “I genuinely was like, ‘I did what?’ And then it hit me. It was all the emotions. That was something I had worked so hard for, for a really long time.”

What Sullenberger also didn’t know as she loosed her arrows that day was that a muscle near her shoulder was slowly tearing. A week later, she competed with the unknown injury at the U.S. outdoor national championship, where she took gold. She was unequivocally at the top of her game. But by October, a creeping pain and tingling down her left arm became hard to ignore.

Sullenberger, who shoots both individually and as a member of Columbia’s women’s archery team, has been “putting an arrow in things,” as she likes to say, since before she was 10. The Florida native was already a youth athlete — competitive dance and tennis — when she had her head turned watching a family friend at hunting practice.

“Sydney just got the bug,” says her mother, Allison Sullenberger. “She said, ‘I want to do that, I want to hunt.’ She legit sold her American Girl dolls and bought her very first bow.” Her new gear was in hand by her 10th birthday party, held at the local range.

Archery quickly eclipsed Sullenberger’s other interests. “She missed one tournament because she had a recital the same weekend, and we couldn’t make both happen,” says Allison, who was herself a college athlete. “She was like, that’s it; I’m done with dance.”

Sullenberger won her first national title when she was 12. She tried all types of archery — including 3D (shooting at foam animals), bowfishing (shooting at live fish) and field (shooting on an outdoor course, in rough or hilly terrain). “I liked that I was able to push myself,” she says, thinking back on her early days with the sport. “It was just me and the bow. I fell in love with the accuracy element, and I wanted to get as dialed in as possible.” (“Dialed in” is the family phrase for finding and maintaining focus; Sullenberger and her mom use it often.)

She shot through the National Archery in the Schools program in middle school, but as a high schooler Sullenberger pursued the sport independently. She was on the road a lot, traveling on weekends to tournaments in Florida and out of state; Allison, who is primarily a PE teacher, worked two jobs to pay for expenses. In 2017, Sullenberger began training with a new coach, Diane Watson, who urged her to slow down a bit — both to give her mom a break, and to steer Sullenberger away from her jack-of-all-trades approach. “I told her, you need to focus on one style,” Watson recalls. Watson also encouraged her to think about longer-term goals and where she wanted to go with archery; did that include college?

That January, she was honored with an Americas 2023 Best Archer of the Year Award. She was also on her way to sitting out the entirety of the 2024 season.

Ultimately, Sullenberger settled on compound archery, which uses a complex and mechanical-looking bow that would not seem out of place in a Terminator movie. It employs a system of pulleys and cables that transmit energy to the arrow — more energy means a faster, more powerful release. (Within compound, Sullenberger considers herself an outdoor specialist; she holds the women’s collegiate record for 50-meter outdoor shooting.)

It was Watson who introduced Sullenberger to Columbia archery coach Derek Davis. Now in his 20th year, he laughs thinking back to the fact that, somehow, she hadn’t been on his recruiting radar. But once they met, he quickly knew that he wanted her to be a Lion. Beyond skill, she had the most important quality he looks for: a positive attitude, especially about joining a team. The latter, Davis points out, isn’t a given in archery, which most people pursue as an individual sport in their early years.

“She was excited about the idea of supporting others and being supported by others, understanding that there would be many times when you have to put your team first,” Davis says. “I find that sometimes for individual high achievers, that’s a challenge — the reason they’re as good as they are is that they focus on themselves. But it was very clear to me that she was going to fit into a team environment quite well.”

He was right. Sullenberger was even named a captain as a sophomore, a rarity according to Davis. That was the 2023 season, which saw her notch a string of Columbia successes, including silver at the USA Indoor Nationals, gold at the USA Archery Collegiate Target Regionals and being named an All-American. Then came that superlative summer — gold at worlds, gold at nationals. When Sullenberger finally visited the trainer in October about the pain in her shoulder, she thought she’d pulled a muscle. “I had been go-go-go for months,” she says. “I thought, Oh, I just need a break.”

The imaging told a different story: Sullenberger had tears in her left bicep and labrum, a ring of tissue that stabilizes the shoulder. It was an overuse injury, albeit an uncommon one for an archer.

That January, she was honored with an Americas 2023 Best Archer of the Year Award. She was also on her way to sitting out the entirety of the 2024 season.

On a Wednesday afternoon in February, Sullenberger chats with her teammates while warming up before practice. During the colder months the archery team convenes at the Nash Building in Manhattanville, inside an echoing white space without many frills. A few rows of folding chairs are set up at one end, a row of six targets at the other. The equipment room is more like a corner that’s been cordoned off by a chain link fence and gate. Inside, a collection of bows hang on a rack: Columbia’s archers shoot either compound or recurve, which is sleeker and more traditional looking.

One of the few literal bright spots is a poster with 10 team goals for the season, written in rainbow colors: have fun and be positive; stay healthy; support each other; rings, rings, rings. The last refers to the Super Bowl-esque rings that come with winning a championship.

Sullenberger makes a joke about the music and playfully commandeers the DJ role. Then she pulls out a Theraband and starts doing exercises, stretching her arms wide. After her diagnosis, she tried rehabilitation before finally undergoing shoulder surgery in March 2024. While still in recovery she encountered a second issue, thoracic outlet syndrome, which robbed her of the proper use of her left hand. She was operated on again in December.

“It takes me longer to warm up than it used to,” Sullenberger says, noting that although she is back in the game, she is not yet at full strength (she was out for a total of 14 months). She acknowledges that her time on the sidelines was difficult — as a teenager she’d managed to compete even after three knee surgeries, shooting from a chair. “This is the first time archery was taken from me,” she says.

She made a point of still going to practices, and attended all of the team’s events — a choice, Davis says, that not every athlete makes. “Some people, when they’re out, they’re out. She would run up and down the field, checking on everybody. ‘Do you need water, do you need Gatorade, are you hungry?’”

“My teammates helped me more than they’ll every know,” Sullenberger says. “And I wanted to give them support, to do whatever I could to help them through the season. I honestly cherished the fact that if they had an issue, they felt comfortable enough to look to me for help.”

When Sullenberger starts her practice rounds, she takes off her eyeglasses, explaining that the scope does the job in their place. Interestingly, a compound archer doesn’t choose when to fire the arrow. Sullenberger demonstrates how, gripping a piece of gear that the bow string clips into. She raises the bow, aims and pulls — back, back, back — and when the tension is great enough, the string releases. The entire process, from set-up to shot, takes about 12 seconds.

“It’s very methodical. We try to do the exact same thing every time, no matter the circumstances,” she says. “Obviously we have to adapt based on weather, lighting, all sorts of things. But it’s trying to stick to the process as much as you can — use that as your grounding force and deal with the other crazy things as they come.”

That focus she describes is what sets Sullenberger apart.

“If you talk to high-end Olympic archers or [athletes from] any type of sport, they believe it, they dream it and they visualize it,” Watson says. “That’s what Sydney and I have always worked on. Putting yourself mentally in the positions you want to be in. Feeling it. It’s even more important for her now.

“She’s such a good study,” she adds. “She’s such a learner. You can ask Sydney to bend over backward and shoot a bow, and she would find a way to do it, and find a way to do it perfectly.”

Davis agrees. “The way she trains and competes — nobody is more committed and driven. When she sets her mind to something, she knows what she has to do to get it, and she’ll do that no matter how difficult it may be.” Allison Sullenberger says that’s always been her daughter’s way. “We may be on the road, in a different city; maybe we could sightsee. But she wants to do her homework, to get her hours of sleep. It’s: ‘Mom, remember, we’re on a business trip. I have work to do.’”

So far, the comeback is going strong. Competing on her own, Sullenberger won the National Field Archery Association’s Indoor Female Freestyle National Championship in February; with Columbia, she took fifth place in individual compound at the USA Archery Indoor Nationals, and she combined with Giselle DeSousa CC’26 to earn a team compound bronze. More recently, she took second place in collegiate compound at the world-renowned Vegas Shoot.

Through it all, Sullenberger is trying to re-climb the national rankings. Because she was out for so long, she had fallen off the list entirely. “It’s like I’ve never shot before,” she says. “I’m building back up from bare bones.

“But I’m shooting — I’m so grateful for that,” she adds. “My biggest goal right now is to just keep doing it, getting back out there on the competition field, keep learning, keep seeing what my body needs as I progress. The big goal is to stay strong and see where it takes me.”