ORANGE CITY — Humboldt graduate Isaac Thurm will get the chance to help Northwestern College out in a new way.

Thurm, who was a four-year baseball player for the Red Raiders, will join the athletic performance staff as a graduate assistant beginning this fall.

“I am super excited to get started here as the graduate assistant strength and conditioning coach, and there is nowhere else that I’d rather start my career at,” Thurm siad. “Being a student-athlete here and transitioning to staff right after will be a blessing, and I am glad that I will be able to work in the program that has meant a lot to me over the past few years.

“The staff here is also great, and I am excited to continue my time in a college community that puts Christ at the center.”

Thurm will be working with Kyle Ochsner, who is the Director of Athletic Performance for Northwestern.

“Isaac will be a valuable addition to our Athletic Performance team. He brings a good amount of experience after assisting us in NWC’s undergraduate strength and conditioning program and having spent some time coaching at the University of Northern Iowa,” Ochsner said. “We are elated that he will be joining us and looking forward to how he plans to serve our Red Raider athletes.”

Recently, Thurm worked in Cedar Falls with the Panthers as an intern. He also coached middle school baseball in Humboldt over the summer and was a volunteer strength coach for the middle school.

Thurm, who recently graduated from Northwestern, was a career .227 hitter for the Red Raiders. During his senior season, he had 13 hits with three doubles, a triple and two home runs.

“I first became interested in sports performance when I was in high school, and that was just because of me lifting to get better at various sports,” said Thurm, a multi-sport standout for the Wildcats. “I always loved it, but lifting was just to get as strong and to lift as much weight as possible. It was always a dream to be a college strength and conditioning coach one day, but I never saw that as an actual job.

“When I was a sophomore in college, this was still my dream, and I decided that it was worth pursuing. During my junior year, I had to take all of the prerequisites for an exercise science major, so it wasn’t the most enjoyable, but I did get to help as a student coach in the Northwestern College weight room a few times a week and I really enjoyed it.

“During the summer after my junior year, I was able to intern with the Strength and Conditioning department at UNI, and this is when I really began to fall in love with it. With this internship, strength and conditioning became much more than just lifting weights myself, and I was able to live a couple of months as a full time coach. Then, during my senior year at college, I was able to take all of the more specialized classes, and I learned that there is a lot more to strength and conditioning than just lifting heavy. While diving more and more into the science of performance, my desire to become a coach grew. Overall, I have always enjoyed athletic performance, but I have come to like it even more over the past few years.”

In his role, he will work with the Red Raider men’s basketball, track, softball and cheer programs, along with helping assist Maria Fruechte with the football program.

“Working with college athletes is going to be very special,” Thurm said. “Over the years with helping out at Northwestern and UNI, I have been able to work with college athletes, but I will now be able to design and implement the programs by myself. Taking on this larger role will have a lot more responsibility with it, and I will be able to make more of an impact.

“Northwestern has some pretty special athletic talents, and I am super excited to see how some of these athletes will develop while I coach them. Its humbling to be selected for this position, but I can’t even begin to explain how excited I am to get started and work with the athletes here.”

Thurm’s brother, Jacob, is a current member of the Northwestern baseball team.