West Virginia University Athletics

Jack Writer led the Mountaineers to the 1964 and 1966 national team titles and won the 1966 individual national smallbore rifle championship. WVU was undefeated during those two seasons, in which Writer captained the team.
 
Writer earned All-America status all three years as a marksman for the Mountaineers, and led WVU to an incredible 41-3 record from 1964-66. One of Writer's teammates was Trish Foster, who would later become the mother of WVU's four-time All-America shooter and 1996 Olympian Jean Foster.
 
Writer went on to bring further fame to West Virginia by winning 19 gold, 14 silver and two bronze medals during nearly 10 years of international competition. Perhaps his finest performance came in the 1972 Summer Olympics at Munich, where he set two Olympic and world records while winning the three-position rifle gold medal for the United States. His records came in the standing (381) and the aggregate (1,166) scores.
 
Writer, WVU’s first-ever Olympian, captured the Olympic silver medal in the same event during the 1968 Mexico City Games, missing the gold by one point.
 
He won world championships for the three-position standard rifle in 1970 and the 50-meter free rifle in 1974. In all, Writer set or was part of four individual and five team records during his years of competition. He was inducted into the U.S. Shooting Team Hall of Fame in 1995.
 
Born Sept. 17, 1944, in Chicago, Illinois, Writer wrestled for Riverside-Brookfield High School, but his favorite interest while growing up in LaGrange, Illinois was riflery. He began competitive shooting at age 12 and won the U.S. junior national championship while in high school.
 
A 1966 graduate of the University, Writer served two years in the U.S. Army and eight years in the Army Reserves while competing internationally.
 
He was inducted into the WVU Sports Hall of Fame in 1996 and was named an inaugural member of the Mountaineer Legends Society in 2018.