35
Colonial Heights, VA
Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU)
Classification: 0.5
Mandy Marchiano grew up in Colonial Heights, Virginia, in a competitive household with three older brothers. Marchiano participated in soccer, dancing and cheerleading. A distracted driver hit the family van when Mandy was 13 years old, causing Mandy to spend nearly a hundred days in a hospital with a crushed C4, C5 and C6 vertebrae.
Nearly 13 years after her car accident, inspired by watching the 2016 Rio Games, Mandy Marchiano decided to pick up adaptive sports. After trying rowing, handcycling, and archery, she tried wheelchair rugby in 2017.
Marchiano played a role in starting a local team in Richmond called the Sportable Possums and in 2022 represented Team USA at the World Games in Birmingham, Alabama, in low point wheelchair rugby (the sport features only players with classifications from 0.5 to 1.5 and differs from wheelchair rugby at the Paralympics, which allows players with classifications as high as 3.5).
Marchiano was named to the US Wheelchair Rugby Team training roster in 2025 ahead of the upcoming quad before the Paralympic Games Los Angeles 2028 and made her debut for the U.S. team at the 2025 World Wheelchair Rugby Americas Championship, an event which the U.S. won gold.
Off the court, Marchiano graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry from Virginia Commonwealth University
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