Olympic dreams fulfilled
Local sharpshooter, gymnast will compete against world's best
Stephen Scherer, a Billerica native competing in the Summer Olympics as a member of the US shooting team, flew off to Beijing last Monday with a little something extra going for him.
Along with his passion for guns, years of sacrifice by his family, and the discipline he gains at West Point, there is this: Scherer is a distant relative of Daniel Boone, the famed woodsman and sharpshooter, according to his mother.
"It turns out Daniel Boone's daughter Jemima married one of the Callaways, who married into the Scherer family," said Susan Scherer. "It makes us related to Daniel Boone on my father's side. Stephen was always interested in guns and shooting from a very young age. He just loved them."
Stephen Scherer joins several other athletes from the Boston area who are competing at the very top of their sports. The others who hail from communities northwest of Boston include Alicia Sacramone, a gymnast from Winchester, and Jarrod Shoemaker, a triathlete from Sudbury.
Scherer, 19, a sophomore-to-be at the United States Military Academy at West Point, is the first Black Knight in any sport to make an Olympic team as a cadet since 1960. He is also the first freshman in school history to do so.
"It's been surreal to step back and look at things in perspective," said Scherer, who grew up with his mother and sister, Sarah. "I didn't plan on being an Olympian. I used to play a lot of sports, but I've always sort of loved guns, and I had a friend who took us shooting with pistols once and I was hooked."
For Scherer, it is a journey that began nearly 10 years after a friend gave him a hand-me-down BB gun.
At age 11, Scherer saw a sign for a junior rifle program hosted by the Massachusetts Rifle Association in Woburn. For $1, Scherer signed up for the introductory program.
It was there that MRA shooting instructor and executive director Bill Tumbarello noticed something special about the family. Both Stephen and Sarah are shooters, shaped and guided by their mother, the only parent in the household.
"I've been around a lot of single mothers in my life," said Tumbarello. "And no one has done a more beautiful job than Susan. She sacrificed a lot for them, and it's such a beautiful thing to see Stephen's accomplishments. This family deserves all the attention it's getting."
Scherer bought his first gun when he was 13. The hours he spent cutting onions while his mother catered weddings allowed Scherer to save up $400 to buy the small-bore rifle.
Practice brought him to the pinnacle.
In March, Army head coach Ron Wiggins brought the rookie to Colorado Springs for the three-day Olympic Trials. Stephen was supposed to gain experience in a sport that favors veterans over newcomers.
Instead, he walked away with a first-place finish in the 10m Air Rifle and the lone remaining spot on the Olympic team's roster. His sister, who is 17, came up just short of punching her own ticket to Beijing; Sarah placed second at the trials.
"Not at all, I wasn't expecting it at all," said Stephen. "I never picked up a gun thinking I'd be in the Olympics someday. Once Sarah and I got serious about it, four or five years ago, we did it because there were opportunities for college scholarships. We just practiced as much as we could."
Indeed, saving money on college tuition played a large part in the Scherer siblings' commitment to the sport. Thanks to a work ethic developed helping their mother work odd jobs, Stephen and Sarah soon spent almost every night at the shooting range.
Ironically, Susan held an anti-gun stance for quite a long time. But the single mother put her son and daughter first.
In Colorado, Stephen won while wearing a new coat and pants bought on the credit card of a family friend. Susan will paint houses, teach international students, cater weddings, and run a Jeopardy! game at local adult centers to pay that friend back.
"I was anti-gun from the perspective that they shouldn't be in society," said Susan. "But Stephen had chosen to go into the Army when he was young, and I thought if he's going into the Army, then I want them to be exposed to them and be as efficient as possible using them."
Like Scherer, another area athlete, Alicia Sacramone, has been at it since a young age.
Two months after a 9-year-old Alicia had her first gymnastics practice, Mihai Brestyan sat down with his wife, Sylvia, and said the little girl had a gift.
"It's hard to describe what it was," said Brestyan, the owner of the American Gymnastics Club in Burlington. "She had the physical ability and coordination but when you look into the eyes of a young girl, you want to see that sparkle. If we lined up 10 kids, Alicia was the one who looked you in the eye and showed interest in what you were saying. She was always ready to run forward, ready to say, 'I want to compete, I want to jump forward.' Sylvia and I decided she could be one of the best gymnasts in the world."
Soon enough, the Winchester native will get her chance to prove her coaches right as she competes in the Olympics as a member of the US Women's Gymnastics Team. The Olympics kick off this Friday with gymnastics competition starting on Saturday.
A sophomore at Brown University, Sacramone, 20, was the first American gymnast since Kelly Garrison, in the late 1990s, to juggle full-time university studies, a full NCAA schedule, and train privately.
The feat, according to Brestyan, is even harder to do for American athletes.
"Today, there is soccer, tomorrow you have basketball, then you have gymnastics," said Brestyan, a former Romanian and Israeli National Team coach. "In Romania, once a child decides on a sport, that is it. No other distractions, so it's much harder to focus on one thing in the US."
