Pearl City’s Sean Lamorena lives with all of the same pressures typical of a senior in high school. Waiting for his acceptance letter from USC, balancing a social life with school and wondering what the future holds for him.

But for an hour a day, Lamorena is far from your typical teenager.

Lamorena is the most accomplished shooter for the Chargers’ dynasty of an air riflery program, and broke state and school records two weeks ago with a 554. That doesn’t happen without shutting off a mind that is constantly in motion.

"Really, it’s mostly mental," Lamorena said. "If you go to practice or a match and you are tired or have a lot of things in your head, it affects your shooting. When you go to practice emotionless, with no emotion at all, then I notice scores get better and better."

Lamorena got into the sport when he failed to make the football team as a freshman, and he remembers the first time he put his cheek on the stock. It felt completely natural, but it took the aspiring aerospace engineering major a while to clear his mind of everything except for a target about the size of his thumbnail 10 meters away.

"He has improved so much," Pearl City coach Les Aranaydo said. "When he was a freshman, he wasn’t the best, but I saw him really start focusing and I knew. I told everyone, ‘You better watch Sean, he is going to be good.’ "

Last year Lamorena, the reigning OIA champion at the time, lost by one point at OIAs and it stayed with him for a long time. Just as a string of bull’s-eyes can seem to go on forever, so can a string of complete misses. A hit follows a miss now.

"Maybe it was hard to do as a freshman," Lamorena said. "But now I have that control of emotions, I guess. I can forget the last shot now."

This is Lamorena’s last chance to do something no public school kid on Oahu has ever done: lead his team to a state championship.

His Chargers have come close, finishing second each of the past two years after going in as kings of the OIA. Lamorena, who finished sixth, believes they had the shooters to do it both years. The Chargers just didn’t shoot to their potential when it mattered.

"Yeah, we choked a bit," Lamorena said. "It’s just that at any given time, we might shoot bad."

On the rare occasions when Lamorena misses a shot, he knows immediately why he missed. He might have jerked the trigger, or he may have held the target too long. His team’s failure last year had a less technical reason.

Some of the shooters at Pearl City are in a hiking club, a school organization that is more about service projects and giving back to the community than actual hiking. The club has an annual Halloween camp that Lamorena and some of his teammates were dying to attend, so they did. High school is about having it all.

"Coach told us not to go to the camp," Lamorena said. "But you know, it is a camp we can’t miss so we went and ended up getting sick or not feeling well for a couple of days. It was just a bad decision."

But don’t call it regret. A good shooter can’t afford to dwell on the negative. Lamorena will use it as a lesson and hopes it makes him better.

Or will he? He insists he won’t be going to the camp this year, since it is the day before his team flies out to Hilo for the state championship.

"I probably won’t go because I don’t want to risk anything," Lamorena said. "But it will be hard. Hiking Club is a lot of fun."