Olympic shooter comes from gun-hating family

Nineteen year old Stephen Scherer, who will be a sophomore at West Point next Fall, has secured a spot on the US Olympic shooting team. Scherer, who hails from Billerica, MA, and whose mom says she was "very anti-gun when my kids were little", won the ten meter air rifle competition at the Olympic trials in Colorado Springs, CO.

(Stephen Scherer will compete for the US in Beijing. Photo: Laura Barisonzi / Boston Globe)

Competing against a 2004 Olympic gold medalist and a two-time Olympic team member, Scherer consistently put up high scores. Out of a perfect 600, he posted 595, 597, and 594 in the daily matches (each competitor gets 60 shots and a bull's-eye is worth 10 points). And each day, Scherer advanced to a bonus round with the opportunity to increase his point totals. His consistency silenced whispers about the teenager being more lucky than skilled at hitting a dime-sized spot on a target 10 meters away; the higher the stakes, the better he performed. "I still can't figure out how he held it all together," says Scherer's West Point coach, Major Ron Wigger. "The mental aspect is learned over time. You just don't go to the Olympics. He was a total dark horse."

Not bad for a teenager from Billerica who professes a love of all things Army and his admiration for Jimi Hendrix in the same breath. And whose mother didn't even want him to have a squirt gun as a boy.

"I was very anti-gun when my kids were little," says Scherer's mother, Sue, who works a number of different jobs, including cleaning and painting houses, running a day care, and organizing Jeopardy!-style entertainment for nursing homes. "I always thought, `Guns are bad. Guns kill people.' So, I didn't want my kids to have anything to do with guns."
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As children of a single mother who struggled to make ends meet, Stephen and his sister see the sport differently than other elite athletes. "I learned how to work your way through life and realized how hard life actually is. Shooting is a privilege and you should have fun with it," Stephen says. "For us, shooting is a part of who we are. It's not what we are."

The Scherers are a close-knit, religious family. They attend Park Street Church in Boston and during the school year go to services at a small chapel at West Point many weekends; they say grace before meals. The three talk and laugh among themselves like best friends. They are bonded by years of home schooling and financial hardship. Sometimes they couldn't make it from paycheck to paycheck. With competitive shooting start-up costs averaging $5,000, the family lived "very cheaply" in order to participate, Sue says, and last year, the Scherers couldn't attend nationals because they didn't have enough money.

"We don't think of it as tough," says Sue. "We just think, `OK, this is the next thing we need. When we have money, we'll get it.' " Unfailingly positive, Sue believes family hardships helped make her son an Olympian much earlier than anyone expected. "He doesn't get nervous in pressure situations," she says. That should come in handy next month in Beijing.

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