Olympics for the

By Miles Gaskin

The first thing to notice when left-handed Marjorie Stemmler pulls back the taut string of her pink and black bow is the fierce determination in her eyes. And when she lets her arrow fly, it’s most often dead center. Medal-winning bullseye.

Stemmler, a Chapman junior English major, is modest about her collegiate-level archery record. But she’s confident in her strengths.

“I can read the wind like I’m a leaf on a tree, and I can dance with my bow like we’re doing the tango,” she said.

She has won multiple medals at the collegiate level. That includes winning a gold medal at the Southern California indoor archery collegiate championship, competing against schools like UC Irvine, UCLA, and USC.

But it’s another gold than Stemmler has in mind. Olympic gold. In 2028, when the Olympics reach Los Angeles.

“I think about it every single day,” she said.

While she will compete in preliminary competitions for the 2024 Olympics, that’s basically meant as a warm up. To see where she stands against the best.

Stemmler is the first Chapman athlete to ever appear in intercollegiate archery. Not that it was easy to get that Chapman affiliation, despite her skills. Partly for insurance reasons, she had to go through intense evaluations from the athletic department to wear the Chapman name, and she had to compete unaffiliated for a year.

While rare, it’s not unheard of for college athletes here at Chapman to pursue either Olympic medals or professional sports. From NFL kickers, to Olympian swimmers, and even long jumpers, Chapman has had a number of elite athletic talent over the years.

But they all came from team sports. Stemmler is the only Chapman athlete to compete individually, according to Mary Cahill, club sport director.

Stemmler’s drive to succeed on the Olympic level comes from her personal competitive nature. Her next goal is to finish in the top 16 shooters at Olympic trials later this year. Stemmler admitted that both she and her coaches didn’t expect her to make it this time around. Her first attempt at qualification is more about gaining experience against top level competition.

Only three men and three women at the very most can represent a national team in the Olympic games, so the roster is quite refined. For Stemmler, the next step in her pursuit of the Olympics is to participate in more international tournaments, so she can start to compete against a higher level of competition. Aside from her collegiate gold medal, Stemmler finished third in the California Indoor Collegiate Championships. Also, when she competed for the indoor national championship, she recorded the second highest score of any collegiate archer at the time of her shooting.

Impressive stats. Especially since Stemmler only picked up the sport three years ago. And nobody in her family knew anything about archery.

“A lot of people I am competing against have been shooting for years and years,” she said.

That means she has to make up for her lack of experience with practice. Lots of practice. And lots of sacrifices.

With classes Tuesday through Thursday, the other days are devoted to long hours on the shooting range. But to strive for the Olympics, she knows she needs to run those sessions seven days a week.

She routinely shoots until the sun goes down.

“I gave up a lot of money, a lot of time, and I don’t get to hang with my friends as much,” she said. “Thankfully, they are understanding that, but it does kind of suck.”

Stemmler is not the first Chapman student to look to pursue her sport at the very highest level. Chapman alumni

Ariana Kukors, and Kate Ziegler, represented the United States and Chapman in swimming at the 2012 London Olympics.

Ziegler earned Silver and Bronze medals at the 2011 world swimming championships, and Kukors at one point held the world record in the 200 meter individual medley.

Chapman Sports Information Director Steven Olveda, recalled a couple of examples of Chapman athletes playing sports professionally as well.

“We have a number of student-athletes who have gone pro. Nick Garcia was a third round pick of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2020. We’ve also had a few basketball players play overseas as well as a football player or two,” he said.

Olveda also mentioned former Chapman football kicker Mike George, who kicked in a game for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Another well known Chapman name is Anna Wlodarcyk —- Coach W to most of her students.

A long time head coach of Chapman’s track and field teams, she competed in the 1980 Moscow Olympic games in long jump.

She placed fourth, representing her native Poland. According to an article by Olveda, “Under her leadership, the women’s track & field program has broken 36 records in 16 different events,” since its inception back in 1993.

Will Stemmler make an Olympic name for herself?

She’s got a strong support team. That includes well known coaches and enthusiastic parents, Kurt and Jessica Stemmler from the Bay area, who are still in awe that their daughter chose this path. She still laughs about that.

“The first ever competition my mom came with me and she asked, ‘Can you really shoot that far?’ Well damn, I hope I can.”

They plan to anxiously follow her daily reports when she competes next month’s outdoor Arizona Cup in Phoenix. That includes qualifications for the Pan-American games in South America.

“It is really cool, because my dad wasn’t all that into archery at first,” she said. “But now he wants to come to these competitions.”

Stemmler really started to pick things up with her pursuit of archery in 2020, when she met one of her most influential coaches, Coach Victor Chia. Coach Chia was one of the first people in Stemmler’s life who really believed she could be an elite archer.

Later she would meet another coach, Eric Tollefson, who has actually coached an Olympian before, Jack Williams, who made the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. He is convinced that a higher level of intensity and training will help take Stemmler’s accuracy to the next level.

While she’s in love with her sport, Stemmler laughs that it isn’t always easy being the only left-hander in the field.

“There’s just not much equipment for left-handed people,” she said. “Also, most of the time I have to face someone while I shoot because the person next to me is usually right- handed. So sometimes I make awkward eye contact with the person shooting.”

As for those in her corner, that includes the entire Chapman athletic community.

Chapman Athletic Director Terry Boesel summed it up: “We would be very happy to see Marjorie fulfill a dream of hers.”