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Schaumburg teen with Olympic dreams in Peru for worldwide precision shooting competition

Saanvi Singh, a junior at Conant High School and a repeat state champion in precision pistol shooting, is taking another step toward her Olympic dreams with her current competition at the International Shooting Sport Federation’s Junior World Championship in Lima, Peru through Oct. 7.

The 16-year-old Schaumburg resident has achieved such proficiency in the Olympic sports of 10-meter air pistol and 25-meter sport pistol that she’s claimed the Illinois state championships for 2022, 2023 and 2024.

But when she started at the age of 12, she was told it would take a bit longer to achieve such tangible prowess.

“I always tell the kids it will take at least four years,” said Saanvi’s coach, 82-year-old Don Weber of the Arlington International Airgun Club in Arlington Heights. “It’s taken her a little less than four years!”

But Saanvi insists she knows why Weber gives that advice and she believes it’s still sound.

Saanvi Singh of Schaumburg poses with the many medals and trophies she's won during her four years in the sport of precision pistol shooting. Courtesy of Sumit Singh

“My dad originally got me into it when I was about 12,” she said. “One of my cousins did it in India. I wasn’t good at it, but I wasn’t bad. Muscle memory does build up in your arms. For the most part I think it’s gradual. In my second year, I understood what makes a shot a good shot.”

Weber said that while some kids can grasp the basics as quickly and instinctively as Saanvi, he’s seen much older ones he doesn’t believe should even be around guns.

One of the appeals he finds in the sport is that one’s size and physicality is not a prime factor in success at it.

“It’s the dedication, and how hard you want to work,” he said.

As far as the impact of gender, Weber’s decades of experience have led him to only one conclusion.

“Girls are easier to teach,” he said.

Saanvi Singh, 16, of Schaumburg is taking her state champion prowess in precision pistol shooting to a new level this week with the start of her first international competition in Lima, Peru. She has the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles in her sights. Courtesy of Sumit Singh

Much is learned about every student’s potential as they begin their training with an emphasis on safety at the club in Arlington Heights.

“The first thing everyone learns is safety,” Weber said. “It’s pounded into them. If you have the desire and the dedication, we can take you as far as you want to go.”

For Saanvi, that’s multiple trips to the Olympics beginning in 2028 in Los Angeles.

Saanvi has already been traveling around the country for competitions, and qualified for the U.S. team in Lima at the national championships in Fort Moore, Georgia in June. She’s the only representative from Illinois.

While Weber said even many successful young people stop competing after college when scholarships or other sources of funding grow more difficult to come by, Saanvi said her ambition is to go on and on.

“I think I will be eligible as long as I maintain my passion for the sport,” she said. “I don’t think there’s that much awareness of this sport.”

Two aspects in particular she thinks many don’t appreciate it the physical training that goes into it, including weightlifting, and the small size of the targets in precision shooting.

In the 10-meter air pistol competition, the guns fire small pellets with pressurized air at targets 11 mm wide.

“It’s really tiny,” she said “It’s really hard to execute that for 60 shots.”

For the 25-meter sport pistol, there are real bullets and a significant recoil as one fires at a distant target about the size of a quarter.

Even though the next Summer Olympics wouldn’t bring a big cultural shift for Americans like herself, Saanvi is hoping to absorb as much of the experience of international competition as she can from her time in Lima. She knows she has no control over any team member’s performance but her own.

“Honestly, I’m just trying to do the best I can and perform to the best of my ability.”

And as the pistols she uses in every competition are her own, the Peru trip will be her first experience in transporting them across international borders.

“So that’s a whole thing,” she said. “It’s a big process.”

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