Triggered memories: Spokane shooter Amanda (Furrer) Banta’s Olympic experience was on target, even without a medal

The Furrer family forked out $4,000 for a blue Anschutz .22-cal. competition rifle some 20 years ago.

Pampered like a Stradivarius, it assisted their youngest daughter in covering a wall – no exaggeration – with awards and medals before accompanying her to London for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games.

“I will always keep it,” said Amanda (Furrer) Banta, 33, from her Spokane home recently.

“Every piece of the rifle and the accessories have been fit to my body.

“I’ve made slashes on the stock so I could tell where my hand-stop and palm rest needed to go for each shooting position.

“I dug into the cheek piece so I could feel where my cheek needed to rest for every shot.

“I cut off and filed down the hand grip so I could bring the rifle closer to my chest in standing (position).

“It has been broken in two and pieced back together again. That rifle grew and adapted with me, and was there for every success and failure, every elation and heartbreak. I could never get rid of it.”

Yet she has not fired a round through the storied firearm since the last shot in 2016 at her third U.S. Olympic trials.

“I have been tempted to pull it out and go shooting, but I never get around to it,” she said, now a financial services professional with her family’s business. She’s also an active volunteer, a wife, and mother of two active kids under 6.

“Once you’ve been at an elite level in something, it’s hard to think about doing it again and being mediocre.”

As a kid, she was nothing less than a hot shot, if you don’t count that introductory session outside her family’s Five Mile Prairie home. Her father, Michael Furrer, proudly tells how badly she missed the target and backboard with a Daisy BB gun – the first two pellets leaving dimples a foot apart in the metal garage door.

“I’ll never get rid of those dents,” he said recently.

That’s how far Amanda had to go in her 10-year journey to the London Olympics.

She was 11 when she started shooting with the Spokane Junior Rifle Team. By 16, competitive shooting had taken her to six countries, and she’d set six national junior records.

In 2007, she boosted her record with a bronze at the Pan Am Games in Brazil.

In 2008, she won gold in the U.S. Junior Olympics. She gave up prom and other Mead High School teen activities that year for the U.S. National Shooting Team.

“Vicki (Amanda’s mom) and I knew she was missing a lot of what is normal in a young lady’s life,” Michael said, “but the experience as a world-class athlete, well, that’s pretty badass, too.”

She winces as she recalls the “crushing” feeling of finishing third in the 2008 Olympic Trials, leaving her behind as the alternate for the U.S. women’s team that went to Beijing. But she shook it off and doubled down on her commitment.

Michael Furrer said he scored a bull’s-eye by introducing his daughter to marksmanship. The Spokane Junior Rifle Team coach made no excuses in a 2012 interview for supporting Amanda’s sometimes angst-riddled decisions to miss most high school events in order to compete with a gun.

“Does a dad want his daughter to go to dances with some kid with his pants halfway down his butt and his hat on sideways, or have her travel the world?” he said.

Their sacrifices paid off as she was recruited and offered the rare combination of academic and athletic shooting scholarships at Ohio State University.

“I was at the right place at the right time in the right circumstances to be a Buckeye,” she said.

Her competition resume expanded in 2010 as she and two other shooters set a team world record in 50-meter 3-position Junior Women’s Rifle at the World Championships in Munich.

And in June 2012, at age 21, she plinked her way into her dreams and onto the U.S. Olympic Shooting Team headed for the Summer Games in London.

The Furrer family’s interest in shooting was not a spinoff of honing skills for hunting.

“I’ve never hunted,” Amanda said.

Michael grew up in a household with no firearms, although he recalls as a child seeing a tree in the distance and wondering if he could hit it if he had a rifle. He got a taste of shooting in a hunter education course at age 10, but that was that, until he joined the Army as a paratrooper and volunteered for the battalion rifle team.

“On day one, I was the best shooter,” he said. “That led to a slot in the newly formed sniper school, and I was hooked.”

Similarly, Amanda’s interest in marksmanship was riveted on rising to the challenge, and where that might lead.

For example, few people are aware that about 30 universities have NCAA shooting teams and scholarship opportunities, said Michael, who coached Amanda through high school and still helps coach the local junior team

“It’s precision, very disciplined, very structured” he said, noting that Amanda fit the model even at an early age.

“She’s an Alpha-type personality. She’s always been world-class as far as attitude.”

After competing in her first match at age 11 and meeting national junior champion and future Olympian Sarah Blakeslee, Amanda told her parents she wanted to give up soccer and temper her longing for girly things and fantasy for being a country singer in order devote herself to shooting.

“When she made that commitment, her mother and I committed, too,” Michael said, thus becoming her No. 1 fans in a sport with the general spectator appeal of watching corn grow.

A year later, when Amanda qualified for her first Junior Olympics, the Furrers offered to buy her a competition firearm.

“I had the Anschutz catalog and did some research before the selection event,” Michael said. “But Amanda made it simple: ‘I want the blue one,’ she said.”

Amanda weighed about 85 pounds, but she adapted quickly to the 14-pound, minutely adjustable rifle and set her first junior national record a few weeks after it arrived.

“She enjoyed beating the boys,” he said.

Amanda is one of several shooting prodigies groomed by the Spokane Junior Rifle Team, which gathers at the Spokane Rifle Club, founded in 1916 on the shore of the Spokane River. Others include Eric Uptagrafft, Hattie (Ponti) Johnson and Launi Meili, who won gold in the women’s 50-meter 3-position rifle event at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain.

By 2021, Amanda had scattered enough empty brass on shooting range floors to build a monument. Although most of a shooter’s practice involves air rifles or dry firing unloaded guns to develop an imperceptible trigger release, Amanda also chambered thousands and thousands of rounds of elite .22 long-rifle ammo.

She postponed spring quarter at OSU and checked in to the Olympic Training Center at Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she devoted herself to physical and technical workouts and rubbing elbows with highly motivated world-class athletes.

She’d already spent countless hours on cardio and weight training and developing core strength in the lean 123 pounds of the 5-foot-6 frame she forged into a rock-solid foundation for her rifle.

Yet she knew that her mind would be the ultimate difference between medaling or not.

“The sports psychology and biofeedback training I did from a young age with Dr. Greg Charboneau (of Spokane) changed my entire shooting career and life,” she said. “The emphasis was on goal setting, training to reach those goals, positive self-talk, visualization and breathing to control anxiety.”

Armed with 10 years of mental and physical preparation, Amanda, who described herself on Twitter at the time as “a girl of God, guns and glitter,” had emerged as one of two women who would be shooting .22s for the USA in London.

Her fate would be decided by 20 shots each from the prone, standing and kneeling positions.

Before firing each time, Amanda would visualize the perfect shot in the dime-size center ring of a DVD-size black bull’s-eye 50 meters away on the Olympic outdoor range.

She would look over the barrel, check the flags to judge the wind and adjust accordingly. Then she’d look at the target through her sights, both eyes open, and apply a tiny bit of pressure to the trigger.

“At this point, I am taking slow deep breaths and repeating my mantra, ‘Relax, relax, perfect,’ ” she recalled.

“I close my eyes, imagine the sights slowly settling down onto the target, still repeating my mantra. I imagine engaging the first stage of my trigger and releasing the shot as soon as I see my perfect hold. I imagine watching the ideal follow through with the sights resting back on the target.

“Then I open my eyes, bring my cheek to the rifle, and make it happen.” Exhaling half the air from her lungs, she focuses intensely on the sight until the shot breaks without consciously squeezing the trigger.

Sixty times, over nearly two taxing hours.

In the end, Amanda didn’t quite make it happen in London. She missed the finalist round by a blink and finished 15th among 47 women from 33 nations, while her friend and teammate Jamie Gray scored an Olympic record and won the gold.

Amanda said she left the Royal Artillery Barracks with lifelong memories, the invaluable title of “Olympian,” and a clean conscience.

“It wasn’t the best that I could shoot,” she said, “but it wasn’t bad either.”

She returned to Ohio State and made commitments to train for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro while completing her Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration plus her MBA.

In 2014, she was named to the U.S. Women’s World Championships Shooting Team. But after she fell short in the 2016 Olympic trials, she retired from competitive shooting to get on with her life.

“Shooting did not play a role in meeting my husband, but mildly played a role in us starting to date,” Amanda said, noting that she and Mike Banta had become friends years earlier while attending Northwood Middle School.

They had lost touch as Mike enlisted in the U.S. Army and Amanda immersed herself in college and shooting, but crossed paths again in 2016 at Fort Benning, Georgia, (now named Fort Moore).

Amanda was training with the national team while Mike was training for the Army’s Best Ranger Competition. They started dating later, after the Olympic trials.

“My husband is a fantastic shooter in his own right,” Amanda said. “But he often jokes that despite having his own successful shooting career in the military, which included being the regimental marksmanship instructor for one of the most shooting-focused special operations organizations, he’s still only the second-best shooter in our house.”

The Olympic experience is an indelible part of her being, Amanda said.

“I often find myself using some of my relaxation and performance techniques from competition in my life now,” she said. “If I am anxious about something like speaking or presenting in front of a group, my shooting mantra and deep breathing bring me back to a place of calm and mindfulness.”

Being an Olympian also has been an effective addition to her resume for jobs and positions.

“My education gets me past initial checkpoints,” she said, “but my Olympic background gets me in the door – it’s the first thing people ask me about.”

Her most powerful memory from the Olympic Games was the wide-eyed march into opening ceremonies.

“Imagine you are in Times Square in New York City,” she said, “but instead of seeing other tourists, you’re standing next to one of the best athletes in the world, who is just standing there bumping into other people, who are also the best athletes in the world.”

As they began assembling behind the flag bearer and moving through a dark tunnel, Amanda linked arms with two other teammates and they squeezed their way to the front of the procession before being born into the roar of the stadium.

“A flood of emotion overcame me as we paraded in and the stadium began chanting, ‘USA! USA! USA!’ Cameras flashed all around us and we all waved with both hands in every direction to the tens of thousands of people in the stands and millions on TV.

“My entire body felt electric, and I smiled so big and so hard for so long that my face hurt. It still brings tears to my eyes thinking about it.”