Alumni Who Inspire: Ginny Thrasher

Biomedical engineering alumna and Olympic gold medalist Ginny Thrasher chatted with us this month about her inspirational journey.

For our Alumni Who Inspire series this month, we connected with Virginia ‘Ginny’ Thrasher, who won the first gold medal awarded at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in the women's 10-meter air rifle.

Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Thrasher is a proud graduate of the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, graduating summa cum laude in May 2019 with a B.S. in biomedical engineering.

Thrasher’s collegiate career concluded with 12 All-American Honors, four National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) individual medals and two NCAA team titles. She also completed a TEDx Talk, “Winning the Olympics: A State of Mind,” and became a Rhodes Scholar finalist. After graduation, Thrasher moved across the country to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs where she trains and competes as a professional athlete.

Thrasher was born in Rome, New York and is a product of West Springfield High School in Virginia. Thrasher shot for her high school rifle team the Acorns, but her love of shooting began when she was 13 while hunting with her grandfather who helped her enroll in a hunter safety course.

Q: Ginny, it is such a pleasure to welcome you back to your Mountaineer family! What brought you to WVU in the first place?

 A: There are very few NCAA D1 rifle programs in the country, so when I decided I wanted to be a student athlete I was looking for a school that had a rifle team and biomedical engineering as a major. WVU was one of the options and when I toured it with my parents, I knew the rifle team and the coaching staff were the perfect match for me. Luckily, the BMEG program was too! I loved that it was a small program where faculty and staff took an interest in each individual student. They weren’t afraid of the complication of me being a student athlete. It was a very easy decision for me to choose WVU athletically and academically!

Q: What was your overall experience while at WVU? Judging by all the accomplishments above, you kept real busy!

My time as a student was definitely unusual! After winning the Olympics in the summer after my freshman year, my life changed forever. I remember coming back to my first day on campus with a camera crew from ESPN in tow and having cupcakes in my first class in the biomedical engineering program to celebrate my Olympic success! That was a special moment and was indicative of the year to come.

I was given some amazing opportunities, including giving a TedX Talk, being honored on the field at several football games and meeting many wonderful people in the Morgantown community. Athletically, winning NCAA championships as a freshman is always a favorite memory, as is WVU hosting NCAA Championships my senior year. We broke the attendance record for spectators, and the last match of my college career ended with a standing ovation.

Q: We are so proud of you Ginny! And you are a proud grad of the biomedical engineering program. What made the program special for you? 

A: What I love most about biomedical engineering as an undergraduate major is the breadth of classes you take. I gained experience in calculus, statistics, chemistry, biology, physics, thermodynamics, electrical engineering, etc. This is a challenge, as there will almost certainly be classes you are great at and classes you struggle with no matter who you are.

I also loved the exposure to research-related projects that I had received through my major; in fact, while in my major, I did an honor project with the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at WVU in which I was looking at wearable wrist biosensor to continuously monitor blood variables. For me, as an athlete, this is an important consideration since it directly relates to performance factors, i.e., sleep quality, heart rate variability and daily strain rate that can be conveniently measured using such wearable technology.

Q: You really kept yourself busy. How did you balance the academics and athletic training to get all these accomplishments under your belt?

 A: Time management is a skill that I’ve learned and practiced continually. On the day to day, it was very doable as long as I was able to be present at whatever I was doing in that moment. Time in the range was time in the range, worrying about a test or homework during that time would make me less productive. Time at school was time at school!

The hardest part for me was traveling, as I missed anywhere from 2.5-4 weeks of our 16-week semester. I was lucky to have a great support system -- my coaches, advisors and professors were able to help me make it work. I was also fortunate to have two amazing friends in my cohort in biomedical engineering and we were able to really balance each others’ strengths and weaknesses.

Q: In your journey as a student, did you experience any setbacks or losses that taught you valuable lessons? How did you overcome them?

A: My second year of college was very difficult. Winning the Olympics made me very famous, like I couldn’t get to class on time because people would stop me in the street, that kind of famous. I never expected or necessarily wanted that!

The adjustment was hard, especially when dealing with high internal pressure for my shooting scores and full-time classes. I eventually realized I could fight the change, or I could make the most of this new opportunity and embrace it. 

The perspective shift didn’t make the situation easier necessarily, but it did make me able to handle it and grow both academically and professionally! 

Q: A perspective shift. I love that for us all. You left a legacy at WVU and in our biomedical engineering program.

 A: I am very proud to be a Mountaineer. When I started at Statler College, I didn’t have any intention of creating a legacy, I just wanted to shoot high scores and go to class. Legacy was a little bit forced upon me, but over time I realized that legacy is not the number of medals you have, but the impact you have on others. I hope I have had as much of a positive impact on WVU as it has had on me. Once a Mountaineer, always a Mountaineer! 

Q: You certainly helped our community to come together; we celebrate you as a student and as an athlete! If you could give one piece of advice to students trying to balance academic life with athletic pursuits, what would it be?

A: Choose. There will be a lot of different tasks vying for your time and attention and you must choose what is really a priority for you and what can slip through the cracks. If you want to truly achieve YOUR something, then you will have to pursue it at the cost of almost everything else. For me it was very important to hit my athletic goals and graduate with honors, that meant when some of my teammates or classmates were out partying, I had to study or trained. This may feel like a sacrifice, but I think the word “priorities” is more accurate. 

Thank you, Ginny, for taking the time to share your inspiring story with us. Your hard work and dedication are a reminder that we need to dream big and make intentional choices to achieve our dreams, while celebrating the profound impact on our lives and others!

The Alumni Who Inspire! Program recognizes alumni for their dedication to their professions, the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources and West Virginia University. The program was launched in Fall 2023 as a monthly discussion board with Statler alumni. 

Like Thrasher, there are so many Statler alumni here and around the world with amazing stories. Join us next month to learn more about our community members and their inspiring journeys; take a lesson from their success book and be the inspiring Mountaineer. Let’s Go!

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