Manassas woman targets little-known sport
By ZACK PHILLIPS
Journal staff writer
Nikki LeCompte realizes hers is not a well-known sport.
She shoots on the rifle team, and most of her peers don’t
seem to know anything about it.
“My friends outside shooting think I’m some great sniper
girl that could shoot an apple off someone’s head from a mile
away,” she says.
Though she’s never attempted such a feat, the 18-year old
Manassas woman is a nationally recognized shooter and, as of
this month, a member of the varsity rifle team at Texas
Christian University in Fort Worth. It has been a dramatic
journey for LeCompte, one that included two straight air
rifle state championships, numerous other honors and a
serious car wreck that almost ended her career.
LeCompte’s involvement with targets began eight years ago
when her mother, Mary, encouraged her to become involved with
Trigger Time. The shooting club is part of 4-H, a national
youth mentoring and leadership program for which Mary
LeCompte serves locally as a regular coach and volunteer.
Unlike conventional rifles, sporter air rifles use a pump
or carbon dioxide to shoot pellets. Facing a series of
bullseyes, competitors take 30, 40 or 60 shots, depending on
the match.
At first, Mary involved all of her five children in the
club – in an effort to teach them how to handle guns safely,
she said – but Nikki was the only one to stick with the
sport.
“I really enjoyed it and I wanted to go somewhere with
it,” she recalled last week, speaking in a telephone
interview from Fort Worth. “I wasn’t good at all the other
things any of the other girls were good at like basketball
and running. [With shooting], I finally found something I was
good at.”
Her enjoyment led to participation in a series of local
club teams, including the Northern Virginia Sharpshooters,
the 4-H Shooting Team in King George and the Optimist Acorns
in Fairfax. She also shot on a rifle team run through the
Navy Junior Recruit Officer Training Command program at
Osbourn Park High School.
In high school, she blossomed into one of the most
accomplished shooters in the area, setting two national
records for JROTC shooters and earning the Distinguished
Expert Medal from the Civilian Marksmanship Program, an honor
given to only 14 adolescent sporter air rifle shooters ever,
her mother said. During her junior year of high school,
LeCompte led Osbourn Park’s team to a state championship and
took the individual championship for herself.
But last fall, her ascendancy was nearly derailed. On the
day before Thanksgiving, a young driver veered across the
roadway and collided with Nikki LeCompte on a windy Fairfax
road. The combined speed of the cars was 90 mph, she said,
and the collision shattered the shooter’s teeth on the
steering wheel.
“My whole body completely went numb and I didn’t know
what to do or say,” she recalled. “And [the paramedics]
said, `Well, don’t move because you could be paralyzed or
have back problems.’”
After returning from the emergency room, the shooter
found that pain in her back and knees made it difficult for
her to kneel or lie on her stomach – two of the three
shooting positions in air rifle competitions. Still, she said
she missed only a few practices and no matches, persevering
while her scores slumped.
The shooter endured months of physical therapy -
exercises to stretch her ligaments in addition to bicycle and
jogging workouts – on her road to recovery. By the time of
the March 29 Virginia Air Rifle Championships in Richmond,
she was shooting well enough to earn a second consecutive
state title, and lead her team to the same honor.
The auspicious fortunes didn’t end there. The senior had
not applied to any colleges, and she and her family decided
she would take a year off before continuing her education.
But at the Air Rifle National Championships in Wilmington,
N.C. near the end of June, a chance encounter with TCU rifle
coach Roger Ivy changed that thinking.
Ivy had lost three recruits to other schools, and was
looking for a talented shooter who still had not committed to
a college. After seeing the scores LeCompte put up with her
sporter air rifle – a much less sophisticated weapon than the
precision rifles many serious shooters use – he was impressed
enough to offer her a scholarship.
Nikki LeCompte and her family took several weeks before
deciding the opportunity was too important to pass up.
“I just figured something like this isn’t going to
happen every day,” she said. “Nobody from my school [knows]
that I’m at college. I just kind of left and said goodbye to
whoever I could.”
Ivy is glad she came.
“It seemed like the very first time she met the girls,
they jelled or meshed,” the coach said. “I asked team
members and the captains what they thought, if [Nikki was a
good addition] and I got `yeses’ all the way around the
board. Personality-wise and shooting-wise, I think that’s all
you can ask for.”
Nikki LeCompte is enjoying her first weeks on the
school’s Fort Worth campus. She and her family agree that
based on her lukewarm interest in high school academics she
likely would not be at college if not for her unique talent.
“There are so many different paths kids take to
college,” Mary LeCompte said. “This has just been her path.”