Our Katniss

After trying archery at summer camp only a few years ago, Inga Pever, a 14-year-old Duchesne Academy student, is now one of the world’s top young archers. (Photo: Rossitsa Israel)

Archery is a sport of romance and fantasy novels, of heroes with quick feet and keen vision. Of Robin Hood, Legolas, Katniss Everdeen.

But it’s not for everyone. This is not a sport for the easily distracted, for those with more adventure inside than discipline.

The Hunger Games made for two hours of suspense on the screen. But take those same hours and imagine spending them, nearly every day, standing perfectly still, focusing on a tiny target as far as three-quarters of a football field away.

That’s what Houston’s version of Katniss Everdeen does.

Her name is Inga Pever. She is 14. She is quiet and academic, an only child, an eighth grader at Duchesne Academy. She has a trim, sporty build and long, unfussy, brown hair. She loves The Smiths and ’80s music and was sad when David Bowie died.

While she is not (yet) the hero of a popular dystopian story, she is, for sure, one of the best young archers in the world.

In early March, she was chosen to travel, as the youngest member of the U.S. juniors team, to Ankara, Turkey, to the World Archery Indoor Championships. She even has a bow-company sponsor, Win&Win Archery.

Her goal is to make the Olympics in Tokyo in 2020. It’s ambitious, considering her youth and the fact that she started archery only three years ago. At that time, she was into soccer. Then she went to Camp Lonehollow for a week.

“She came back,” says her mom, Melanie Pever, “and said, ‘I want to take archery lessons.’”

Her mom, now a realtor and personal chef, and her dad Daryl Pever, a software developer, started Googling. They found James Loesch, who, with his wife Susan, runs Houston Archery Lessons.

“I started with her when she was 11,” says coach James, “and she has been the most dedicated student I’ve had in that time, not even close. When she wasn’t in school, she was shooting.”

By the age of 14, Inga had an impressive six national championships. She has gotten there the boring way – boring, that is, if you have a short attention span. For Inga, it’s a fascinating puzzle, where perfection is required, millimeters matter, and a target can be indoors or outside and 20 to 70 meters away.

There is no shortcut. She just practices. She spends a lot of time at West Houston Archery just north of I-10 past Beltway 8 (and also some time outdoors at Buffalo Field Archery). While the downstairs part of the West Houston shop is all about hunters, with camouflage and compound bows, the long white room upstairs is about teaching the classic Olympic recurve bow.

Often Inga practices on her own. Sometimes her coach stands nearby, murmuring advice. “There it is,” he told her during a recent practice. “That was perfect. What did you do? You need to know so you can replicate it.”

She raised her eyebrows, smiled faintly and shrugged, like a teenager, in her blue polo shirt and plaid school-uniform skirt, her quiver positioned dashingly across her hip.

Then she placed an arrow, raised her bow – equipped with a protruding stabilizer bar but no scope or mechanical advantages. With her body perfectly straight and facing the side, she drew her arm back, raising her right elbow up above her ear until the string pressed lightly against her lips.

She looked nothing like an unsure teenage girl.

There was a nearly imperceptible “tick” and then “thwang,” followed by “thwack.” It was a satisfying sound, one she hears often. She practices two hours a day, five days a week.

“Even when she was little she could sit for hours,” says her mom. “She is a singleness-of-purpose kind of person.”

Coach James calls archery “kind of a loaner sport, an individual sport – it’s how well you work on it on your own.” It helps to be a little obsessive. “That kind of personality really tends to excel in this sport. From the outside, it looks like a beautiful art form.”

“A big part of it is how strongly and smoothly she makes that motion through the clicker,” he says. The clicker is a small device that signals when the metal tip of the arrow has drawn back far enough to be let loose.

Inga, after practice, tells how one of her favorite moments was outdoor Nationals in 2014, after a rain delay, shooting in the dark. “It was just so intense,” she says.

She answers the inevitable question about The Hunger Games. No, she hadn’t read or seen it before she started. Finally, she saw the movie. “In the posters,” she says of actress Jennifer Lawrence, who plays Katniss, her position “is really accurate. But in the movie, she is not.” But she liked it.