Rawlins High Grad Leads Team to 20 Medals

Twenty-four medals were handed out following the shooting competition at the Wounded Warrior Games in Colorado Springs in May. Roger Withrow's fingerprints, at least metaphorically, were on 20 of them. Withrow, a 1976 graduate of Rawlins High School, coached a team of 18 injured Marines to all eight gold medals, six silver medals and six bronze medals.

For Withrow, a paraplegic with a storied shooting history - including a gold medal at the 1984 Paralympic Games - the accomplishment went beyond acquiring precious metals.
"I was dumbfounded, I was totally dumbfounded," he said. "This had to have been the best I've felt on the shooting range since I won my gold medal, anyway. Easily. It was so overwhelming I never thought I'd be a part of this."

Withrow spent part of his youth in Hanna before his family moved to Rawlins for the last five years of his schooling. While at RHS, he shot with the junior rifle club. "I ended up winning a scholarship to Murray State University," in Murray, Ky., Withrow said.
Success followed him to the Bluegrass State where the Murray State Racers shooting team won the collegiate championship and Withrow won the high-powered championship in 1978. "I was wanting to try to get on the 1979 Pan-Am Games. With me shooting real well in 1978 in high-power I decided to go for it," he said.

In the summer of 1978 he suffered an injury that caused three herniated discs in his back. He decided to leave college to move back to Rawlins where he rehabilitated his back at Memorial Hospital of Carbon County in the morning and then worked the rest of the day. "(While working) in the spring of 1979, I ended up being smashed by a truckload of pipe," Withrow recalls. "The pipe was 36-inches in diameter and 20-foot long."

He was flown to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and spent the next 18 months in rehab.
"I pretty much knew at that time I was a paraplegic," he said. "It was a heartbreaker. What else can I say? I was at the top of my life at that time and all the sudden someone knocks the blocks out from underneath me."

Withrow recalled watching the 1979 Pan American Games from a hospital bed.
Through his disappointment, he decided to get back to shooting and started the Wheelchair Shooting Federation in 1980. "We did not have wheelchair shooting in the United States," he said, adding there was no Paralympic team.

He said he was the first shooter on the U.S. Paralympic team and competed in the 1984 Paralympics in the United Kingdom. "That's where I picked up the first and only gold medal USA Paralympic shooting has today," he said.