This Teen Is Shooting Star

Collyn Loper’s cap is tugged low, her smile wide, her mood chipper.

And her aim? Downright scary.

The high school junior is one of America’s best female trap shooters heading into the Athens Olympics despite her age and a genetic disease that left her blind in her right eye since birth.

“When I get out there on the field I’m a totally different person. I’m all business,” she says, then giggles.

Still a teenage girl, even with a shotgun perched on her shoulder at a shooting range.

The 17-year-old Loper finished first in the women’s trap at the Olympic Shotgun Team Trials, winning a tiebreaker over the U.S. Army Marksmanship Unit’s Staff Sgt. Joetta Dement on March 21 at Fort Benning, Ga.

She also won the gold medal at the Pan Am Games last year.

But the Olympics? At 17? That’s what she used to write on school papers about what she wanted to accomplish in the future -- the near future, apparently.

“I know now that it will be one of the largest things I do in my life,” Loper said. “As a kid, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s never going to happen.’ The last few years, I’ve seen it get closer and closer. Finally, it’s so close, I’m like, ‘Wow, I actually have a chance at it.”’

It’s no surprise to U.S. shotgun coach Lloyd Woodhouse or her father, Brian, an avid outdoorsman who taught her to shoot when she was 10.

At 14, Loper finished third among juniors in her first international competition in Cairo, Egypt, shooting against competitors up to seven years older.

“It was like she’d been doing this thing all her life,” Woodhouse marveled at the time.

“She has a high level of natural talent,” Woodhouse says now. “She has intensity and focus that is somewhat unusual for a young person of her age. She works really hard at it.”

Asked if he sensed his daughter’s potential even before Cairo, Brian Loper says simply, “I knew.”

“I’ve got a perfect image of her -- I’ll never forget -- 14 years old, in Cairo, she’s just shot her first 25 ever. It’s her first international competition and she hits 25 straight,” the former college tennis player said. “I’ll never forget it.”

Nor will his daughter, who has been hooked on the sport ever since.

“With the excitement of the competition and everything, that’s when I knew that’s pretty much what I wanted to do,” she said. “It came about real fast.”

Loper was born with an eye disease called Colomba, leaving her blind in her right eye. She trained herself to shoot left-handed, though she does most other things with her right.

In a sport where one eye is closed while aiming, opinions vary on whether her blindness is an advantage or handicap (Loper says it’s neither).

“It depends on what mountaintops you view the valley from,” Woodhouse said. “She has assets that she employs very, very well.

“Other people say, ‘Well, she’s blind in one eye.’ But you know what, she seems to have overcome that superbly.”

Loper brushes off the challenge of shooting left-handed as “just like normal,” since she never knew any other way.

“It really wasn’t that difficult,” she said.

Serious practice, on the other hand, is a challenge.

Loper tries to make a five-hour roundtrip to Fort Benning once a week to practice during the school year -- twice during the summer -- leaving at dawn, shooting four hours or so and driving back.

On weekends, Loper and her father often shoot at Southern Skeet and Trap on the outskirts of Birmingham, mingling freely with a mostly older male clientele.

“She seems like a good little ole girl,” owner B.K. Smith said. “She fits in well with the crowd.”

And with her fellow competitors, too. Even when they’ve just lost to a high school kid.

“She just bubbles,” Woodhouse said. “How can you not like her?

“The competition is on the playing field. Behind the lines, everybody is friends. There’s no dislike carried off the field of play.”

One of three team members in women’s trap, Loper is currently the youngest among those qualified for the U.S. Olympic team in shooting events.

“I think she’s got a good chance,” Woodhouse said. “She won the gold medal at the Pan American games. The competition certainly was not at the level she’s going to see in Athens.

“But if she puts together three good rounds and a finish, she certainly could be medal potential.”

Not a bad lead-in to your senior year of high school. A good way to impress her friends, too.

“They think it’s really neat, guys especially,” Loper said. “It’s kind of like, ‘Hmmm. So you shoot guns, right?’ My close friends think it’s the coolest thing in the world.”

She’s not about to disagree.