Rhodes University Archery Club Coach and PhD student, Lance Ho, returned from Yankton, South Dakota, where he was coaching the Junior Protea Squad at the 2015 Youth World Championships.

“Overall it was the best performance we’ve had from a junior team, we just missed out on the medals. It was a bit unfortunate,” he says.

In the team event they came fourth just missing the bronze due to a technical difficulty. Individually the highest finish was a fifth place but all of the squad finished in the top ten out of 52 countries who were participating.

“They like to send their juniors over because these are their Olympic hopefuls so they send them over to these ‘test’ events,” explains Ho.

South Africa is top in the world when it comes to shooting with compound bows but unfortunately the Olympics only has shooting with recurve bows as an event.

“Recurve shooters need to train at least six hours a day, which requires more dedication, effort and time.  A lot of people don’t have that in South Africa, they don’t have the luxury of being a professional athlete,” adds Ho.

Ho started his coaching career at Rhodes and is currently the coach of the Rhodes University Archery Club. His name is well known in archery circles at Rhodes and beyond. He is the Eastern Cape Provincial coach.  Lance has been active in archery since 2003 and has been recognized both locally and nationally, representing SA at the 2006 Youth World Championships in Mexico and at the 2011 Universiade Games held in China. Ho was also previously selected as Coach for the 2012 SA Paralympic Team for the Stoke Mandeville Event in the U.K.

Ho was both the 2012 Sportsman of the Year and 2012 Student Coach of the Year at Rhodes University.

When not in the field, he can be found hard at work on his PhD in Biotechnology. Ho is part of the Biotechnology Innovation Centre where he is part of the team developing tools for early disease detection like HIV and malaria. His research focuses on the development of diagnostic tools to detect a range of different diseases. The work is aimed at developing low cost diagnostics that hold the power to save lives, by finding tiny molecules in blood that are the markers of disease.