From hoops to track, rugby to dunking, Adobe intern Victoria Agyin takes her talent wherever she goes

From hoops to track, rugby to dunking, Adobe intern Victoria Agyin takes her talent wherever she goes

Victoria Agyin isn't one to shy away from a challenge. Fiercely competitive and confidently open-minded, she enjoys demanding environments and embraces difficult experiences - physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Agyin has repeatedly put herself in unfamiliar situations, pushed her body to its physical limits, and looked for opportunities to meet different people and try new things - often doing so through sports. And while most elite athletes train their whole lives in a single speciality, the recent Adobe intern and aspiring Olympian has spent her life competing at a high level in not one sport, but three.

Growing up, it was basketball. In college, track and field. Now it's rugby, a sport she just started playing that she's hoping will land her at the next Summer Olympic Games. Next, perhaps the conclusion to a totally different athletic journey she's taken herself on. And after that, who knows?

"I've always been excited by a new challenge, especially something that I've never done before," says Agyin, who recently completed an internship on the Adobe Express product management team.

During the Olympics, we're captivated by the extraordinary abilities and performances of exceptional athletes and inspired by the humanizing stories that help us relate to, believe in, and cheer for them. And that includes those of people who've since found their place at Adobe. This is Agyin's story.

Falling in love with sports

Agyin was born in New York to a Ghanaian father and an American mother. As a young child, she moved with her dad to Ghana and then to the UK before returning to the US for elementary school.

"[Our home life] wasn't really stable," Agyin says. "We got evicted and everything. I had a very tough childhood."

Eventually, she went to live with her aunt in Marietta, Georgia, just outside Atlanta. And, Agyin says, "That's when I played basketball for the very first time."

She had never picked up a ball - or played any sport - until then, but she fell in love immediately. Agyin soon started playing organized basketball, but it wasn't just the game itself that she adored. It was the running and jumping, battling on the blacktop with bigger kids, trying to figure out how to win. She craved the competition.

At McEachern High School, Agyin played varsity basketball, winning the state title three times and finishing runner-up during her four years. She also discovered a new sport, which took advantage of her gifts even more than hoops.

"Everybody noticed how fast I was and how high I could jump, so they told me to do track and field," she says. "I was always really athletic, and having that background playing basketball, you're constantly training your body."

"When you're in that type of environment where you're just outside all day because you have limited resources, you're very active, you're finding different ways to entertain yourself. I was getting those reps in with boys six years older than me and just putting myself in a stressful physical environment, which was basically adapting my body to be miles ahead of everybody else as I got older."

Agyin became the top-ranked athlete in Georgia for the triple jump and a two-time state champion. In the classroom, she was just as impressive: National Honor Society, National Beta Club, Robotics Club, top 1percent of her graduating class.

Agyin's academic and athletic achievements earned her a Division 1 track and field scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. When she enrolled in 2018, she was excited but not entirely sure what to make of her new Ivy League environment right away.

"That was a big thing for me, being first-generation, low-income," she says, proudly showing off the Penn Track & Field sweatshirt she's wearing. "It was such a culture shock just because I wasn't expecting the level of different backgrounds. But it was also really cool for me, like, [some of] these people come from such a different upbringing, and we still have a lot in common, and I still have things to talk about."

Agyin relished her college experience, making friends and learning about herself. While never someone who ran away from difficult situations, she says she was able to perform better in the classroom and on the track because she felt comfortable, settled, and unstressed. She helped Penn win the Ivy League Heptagonal Indoor Championships in 2019 and 2020, setting the program record in the triple jump with a leap of 12.67 meters before her final two seasons were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A hobbled athlete turned high-flying influencer

In 2022, after earning her bachelor's degree in cognitive science and with an eye toward her professional future, Agyin decided to move to Silicon Valley to pursue an MBA at San Jose State University. Thanks to the NCAA COVID-19 eligibility extension, she was able to compete for the Spartans' track and field team as a graduate student. Agyin set personal bests in the long jump and triple jump in 2023 and was looking forward to 2024 being the best year of her career.

It didn't go as planned.

During preseason, Agyin hurt her knee. At first, the team staff didn't think it was serious, so she pushed through it, "just hobbling around," she says. But the knee got progressively and painfully worse. In February, she got an MRI scan, which revealed a torn medial meniscus, a serious and debilitating injury for anyone - but especially for a jumper.

"I was like, no wonder it's killing me," Agyin says. "I had no idea it was torn, but the pain was intense, and I had to keep jumping through it. That did not put me in a good place mentally, emotionally, or physically, and I had a bad season because I wasn't given the time to rest."

Agyin was disappointed with how her final track season ended. But despite the interruptions and injuries she endured as a college athlete, she knew she'd gotten stronger, faster, and "more physically developed." There was another silver lining too. She'd been working at an elite level every day for nearly six years, and in all that time long jumping and triple jumping, Agyin had fallen in love with a new kind of jumping. Or, rather, a new reason to jump.

The previous summer, she'd started what she now calls her "dunk journey." It began as her own personal goal of trying to dunk a basketball, an extraordinarily ambitious goal for the 5-foot-6 Agyin who would need to leap more than 50 inches to touch the rim of a 10-foot hoop. But her journey soon became something more as she shared practice videos on social media "to inspire people - short, tall, man, woman," she says. "You can dunk, or even if you can't dunk, you can come close and develop yourself and improve just a little bit."

After her knee healed, she returned to training and went from grazing the rim to grabbing it. Today she can touch 10 feet, 6 inches without a ball. The last step is dunking with the ball. Agyin's videos have received more than a million views from her 58,000 followers and hundreds of supportive comments from enthralled fans.

"I was showing my true, raw, authentic journey from barely touching rim to almost dunking, and people gravitated toward that," she says.

Agyin says she was "so close" to a successful dunk last year before she got hurt, but she refuses to let a setback stop her. "That was a bump in the road," she says. "And it makes it an even better story that you can get knocked down and come back and still achieve great things."

New sport, new challenge, and surviving the bronco

On TikTok and Instagram, Agyin creates a lot of content. Her profile is filled not only with bouncy videos of her jumping in - or practically out of - the gym, but also dancing playfully, showing her skincare routine, and drawing Simone Biles (kind of) on a whiteboard for the Pictionary prompt: Olympic greatest of all time.

Amid all the other reels, an unexpected one Agyin posted recently gives a glimpse of the latest inspiring athletic challenge she's taken on: Training for a spot on the US women's rugby team for the 2028 Olympics.

Just like when she was in high school and her physical ability on the basketball court got her noticed by the track and field team, Agyin's natural athleticism and well-documented competitive spirit - on the track, in the gym, on camera - caught the attention of USA Rugby, the national governing body of the sport.

Rugby is one of the fastest-growing sports globally for women, and USA Rugby wants to fast-track that growth in America - particularly focusing on rugby sevens, a faster-paced and higher-scoring version of the game with only seven players on the field, instead of 15 like in traditional rugby union.

At the Paris Olympics, the US women's rugby sevens team turned heads by winning a bronze medal, the country's first-ever medal in rugby. The goal for the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles is to compete for gold and show the world that American rugby has arrived.

That means discovering and developing new players like Agyin to put into the national pipeline. "[USA Rugby] sent me this email and I'm thinking, 'I have no experience in rugby. What do you mean? How could you pick me?'" Agyin says. "I'm thinking they saw me on Instagram, but really they were looking for explosive athletes that they could develop."

Her first training camp with the Olympic developmental team was eye-opening and exhausting, even for an elite track and field athlete. It was a blur of aerobic fitness and conditioning workouts, including the bronco test, a notorious assessment popularized by New Zealand rugby that involves participants performing high-intensity shuttle runs to various distances with no rest.

"Hardest thing I've ever done in my life was that bronco," Agyin says, shaking her head. "Basically, you're running for five minutes straight and constantly changing directions. I've been doing sports my whole life, and that was the most grueling, intense physical activity I've ever done."

But Agyin survived, and while she was still basically Googling the rules of rugby, she says she loved the experience. "I got to meet so many different people, so many amazing athletes," she says, noting the professional soccer players, acrobatic gymnasts, and other rugby rookies recruited to camp. "It was just cool being in that environment around elite talent, and I feel like it brought a different type of ability out of me that I didn't think I had."

At this stage, Agyin is still learning everything she can about the game and doesn't have a position - though, given her size and quickness, she thinks she could be a winger. The main thing she knows is that she likes playing defense. "That was my strength in basketball," she says. "I can read body language. I really pride myself on defense."

"It was definitely a challenge," she says. "For the first time, I felt like, wow, I have to catch up. But I really like being able to grind and get better and just develop, because I feel like I can. If it was something I felt was so out of reach, then it'd be kind of, I don't know if I can do this and I'd have more self-doubts.

"But I feel like, for me, it's within reach because of my talent and work ethic."

After showing potential at the first training camp, Agyin was invited back for a second camp. With a good performance there, she'll make it to a final tryout in September. That's the last round before USA Rugby decides who will be selected for the residency program, where players live at the national team facility and prepare to become the best rugby players in the world.

From creating content with Adobe Express to being on the team

Besides rugby camps, Agyin's talent and work ethic - not to mention her fun and engaging content - also brought her to Adobe, where she was selected for a summer internship on the Adobe Express product management team. It was a good fit for Agyin, who uses Express regularly to make her videos and says that "as someone with no skills or experience" in editing and design, the all-in-one content creation app is "very useful."

At Adobe, Agyin enjoyed new kinds of challenges - looking into metrics, seeing how people behave, comparing behavior to feedback, trying to improve engagement with AI features and understand users better, lots of problem-solving.

As a new intern, Agyin says, "There's so much ambiguity, and you don't really know where to start." She compares the learning process to sports since there are other people on the team who can help - they coach her in certain situations, guide her through projects, give her an assist, and put her in a position to succeed.

"Being at Adobe, there are so many smart, talented people," she says. "When you're having conversations with them, you're always gleaning new information and figuring out how to think differently. You talk to the sales team, the marketing team, the design team, and you find so much overlap, but everyone around you is so knowledgeable and talented that it makes you excel and pulls new ability out of you."

Agyin found Adobe to be an "amazing environment." She says the experience of meeting people and confronting her preconceptions was reminiscent of how she felt initially at college.

"When I started my internship, I was like, OK, I'm going to be a product manager with all these adults," she says laughing. "I'm thinking, it's very serious and stoic people in suits. But it wasn't like that. They were very human and friendly, and I feel like that provided a great atmosphere for me to work without stress and just truly develop without overthinking everything I did. It's fun, exciting. It's colorful. The people are vibrant and helpful, and I'm not sure I could have been able to replicate how I feel and what I did at any other company, especially this early in my career."

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