Teen shooter succeeds as a lefty

Blindness in one eye forced Collyn Loper to make a major change.
By KRIS AXTMAN
THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
INDIAN SPRINGS, Ala. -- She leads an ordinary teenager's life, filled with concerts and driving privileges. She smears cherry-red nail polish on her fingers and toes, and spends way too much time on the phone with her best friend, Lauren.
Then there's that gun safe in the basement. The poster of gun-toting Annie Oakley in her room, and her intimate knowledge of Italian gunmakers.
Collyn Loper is not so ordinary after all. Since age 10, she's had a shotgun in her hands and dreams of the Olympics in her head. Now, seven years later, she's in Athens, competing as the youngest member of the United States' shooting team.
If her age didn't give her away when she stepped onto the range in the women's trap Monday, the "goofy glasses" did. The right lens of Collyn's shooting glasses is blacked out entirely. That's the eye that has been blind since birth.
"I've had people come up to me and ask, 'Where can I get sunglasses like that?' " she chuckles. "Other people ask me, 'Do you have an eye dominance problem?' I say, 'Yeah, a big one.' "
While it may seem like a major impediment in any sport, Collyn just shrugs it off. "They way I look at it, I'm equal to everyone else."
Achievements
Actually, for most of her shooting career, she has been better than everyone else. Her achievements include a bronze medal at the Junior Olympics; a gold medal at the Pan Am Games; and a place on the Olympic team by beating out an Army markswoman nearly twice her age.
After Collyn spent much of her childhood "running into things," her father, Brian, pondered the sports that required little depth perception.
He also realized that his daughter could see things better when they were moving away from her. So one day when she was 8-years old, he took her into the backyard, showed her how to hold a BB gun with her left hand instead of her dominant right, and began throwing Frisbees into the air.
Amazingly, the pellets began pouncing off -- and from that moment on, Collyn was by her dad's side whenever he would go to the shooting range. Soon she learned to handle a shotgun and was outscoring many of the older men, including her own father.
"The first time she held a gun, she knew what to do. She could hold the gun, swing the gun. She had the form and ability," says Brian Loper, himself an avid hunter and fisherman.
Competitions
As she progressed, the two drove every weekend to Atlanta to practice at the now-closed Olympic range. There she caught the eye of a shooting coach and soon began traveling to competitions around the world -- and winning them.
"A lot of shooters close one eye to aim. What is amazing to me is that Collyn switched to being left-handed," says Kim Rhode, her teammate and roommate in Athens. "That is almost impossible to do."
Rhode is a good sounding board for Collyn. At age 16, she was the youngest shooter in the history of the US team. She is now competing in her third Olympics.
"The neat thing about shooting is that it doesn't matter how big or how old you are," Rhode says. "It's one of those games where everyone's on an equal playing field."
Collyn isn't sure that's what her future holds. College is definitely in her future. Her goal is to get into Vanderbilt University and major in chemistry.
But she's not sure she wants to continue training so intensely after these Games. "Last year, I lost a lot of days of school to training," says Collyn.