WSN:  Welcome back to In The Huddle, a podcast by the Washington Square News. I’m Kiran, deputy sports editor at WSN, and with me today is Josephine Dziedzic, a junior on the cross country team from Chicago, Il. After sweeping the UAA Championships, Josephine and the team are set to run in the NCAA Niagara Region Championship this Saturday. Thank you for joining me, Josephine.

Dziedzic:  Thanks for having me. I’m excited. 

WSN:  I’m excited too. So to start, let’s talk about the UAA Championships. You had a very successful weekend, you placed third overall. How are you feeling right now?

Dziedzic: I feel great. I was so excited to win as a team, like watching the boys and girls win together. That has never happened for NYU before, and I think it’s only happened one other time in the UAA with WashU. 

WSN: That’s right. 

Dziedzic: So it was so cool to be able to see the boys do so well, and the girls do so well.  I mean, we’ve been chasing that for a long time, so I was just so proud of everyone. 

WSN:  Yeah, let’s talk about that sweep. Like you said, it was really historic, and we’ve all seen the numbers, but what was it like to actually be there with the team that weekend? Were you guys expecting it? I mean, how did you feel going in?

Dziedzic:  I think we definitely were aware that it was a possibility. I think I was feeling very confident on the girls side, along with my teammates. We were feeling very confident that we could win. Last year, honestly, going into it, I thought we were gonna win and then we came away second, so I was prepared for anything.  You know, you never want to underestimate the competition, but, we’ve been having such a good season that I was feeling very confident in our abilities and we’re so deep this year that even if a couple people have off days, we can totally recover from that.

 I think the guys felt the same. Like, you know it’s tough competition. UAA is one of the most competitive conferences in D-III, so I think we were definitely aware that it was a possibility, but trying not to focus so much on the result and just run our race. But I think afterwards everyone was happy, because how can you complain about two first place finishes?

WSN:  Exactly. That’s incredible to hear. Let’s go back a bit to October. In the Connecticut College Invitational Blue Race, you ran your career best 6K time, and then right after you were named UAA Athlete of the Week. Correct me if I’m wrong, I believe it was your first.

Dziedzic: My first UAA Athlete of the Week, yeah. Yeah, yes it was. 

WSN:  Alright, so what was that like for you?

Dziedzic:  That was kind of crazy. Conn was such a fun race. That race specifically is like the most fun day that I have every year on the team. It’s just a gorgeous course, and so to be able to set the record there was really cool. And it was all the best girls in the country. So, my coach gave me the green light, basically, and he was like, “Go for it.” Like, “Go try and rip one.” And I was like, okay, gonna go out as fast as I can, I guess.

 So I went out with some of the fastest girls in the country and like, since I’m a junior, I’ve been here a while, and I feel like I’ve had a big jump this year, so I knew who they were, and I was like, kind of just hyping myself up to go race with them and just trying to convince myself like, “Okay, I deserve to be here and I can go up there.” 

Because also in a cross country race, if you go too hard at the beginning, it will definitely bite you back in the end. So I didn’t want to be overly confident, but I also was trying to stay calm and know like, okay, I can test myself a little bit here. It ended up really well. I was ecstatic with a third place finish, honestly.

WSN:   Awesome. Well, congratulations. It was definitely deserved. Let’s go back a little bit further to high school. 

Dziedzic: Oh yeah. 

WSN: You were a four-year cross country and track member, but you also played basketball for three years. 

Dziedzic: Yes. 

WSN: Tell me a bit about what inspired that decision, and how you liked that experience. 

Dzeidzic:  I’ve been playing a lot of sports since I was in like fourth grade. I kind of started sports late, I guess. Didn’t love cross country. I didn’t love cross country as a fourth grader, because who would? But I’ve been doing it since I was nine, so yeah, I’ve been in the sport for a while. 

I loved basketball in high school and in middle school. I played on a travel team, from like sixth grade until I was a junior in high school. I always thought I’d be doing basketball all the way through.

WSN: What inspired you to make the switch to cross country full-time?

Dzeidzic:  I decided to quit after my junior year. I made a pretty big jump going from sophomore year to junior year of high school. And like I did, I’ve always done sports for fun, just because I like it and I think it’s fun and cool. But in my junior year I started to perform well. And I didn’t ever think I’d run in college, then I started to realize like, oh, that could be a possibility for me.

 And, my high school coach told me, if you give me a year — he never told me to quit basketball — but he said if you give me a year of focus, then you’ll probably be good enough to run in college.

WSN: Your high school cross country coach?

Dzeidzic: Yeah, my high school cross country coach.  And so I did that, trained all summer with him, and I got to meet a lot of other girls and train with them as well. And yeah, I worked really hard my senior year and it paid off, and now I’m here, which is great. And basketball, you know, I’ll always love it, and it was really fun at the time, but I’m definitely happy with the decision I made. You have to sometimes make sacrifices in order to succeed, and I’m glad that I did that.

WSN:  Yeah, definitely. Now, the NCAA Niagara Region Championships are coming up on the 15th. Last year you placed in seventh overall. Tell me a bit about what you’re looking forward to this weekend and how you’ve been preparing for the competition.

Dzeidzic:   Going into the regional meet, it’s really relaxed vibes. Like we’re not gonna be racing all out, we’re gonna be doing like a group tempo type of situation, and we did the same last year. Which is really fun, honestly, because you get to just pack up with your teammates, and we’re gonna save our legs a bit for nationals. It was really cool to win last year, like, not even racing all out, and SUNY Geneseo is a great school, and they’ve always been really talented, so beating them last year was kind of crazy.  

But yeah, I think all focus right now is on nationals, to be honest. We’ve done well enough, both teams, throughout the season, that we’re not so worried about getting there, but we want to do our best along the line.

WSN: Awesome.  And you’re also part of NYU’s track and field team. Tell me a bit about, as cross country starts to wrap up, what you’re looking forward to in the transition and also in the track and field season as a whole. 

Dziedzic:  Yeah. Man, I can’t believe it’s almost here.  Right. All of the kids who do cross country, I don’t think everyone realizes — we’re three sport athletes. Like we do cross country, indoor track, outdoor track. We have zero offseason.  I think we’ll take 10 to 14 days off in between. 

WSN: Wow. 

Dziedzic: In between cross country and indoor, and then we take a break after outdoor track going into the summer. But other than that, we’re running all the time.   So honestly, I don’t know how much I’m gonna step off the gas. You know, I love cross country the most because I love the team sport and I love the dynamics of it, racing for your teammates and with your teammates, but track is kind of a different beast.

 5K and 10K are two of my favorite events, and they’re very time-based. Like, in cross country, you don’t really worry about times as much, it’s all about where you’re placing. And in track, it’s all time-based, because that’s how they decide to go to national meets. It’s the top 20 for indoor, in each event, whoever has the 20 best times gets a bid.

WSN: That’s a lot of pressure. 

Dzeidzic:  Yeah. It’s very, very focused on the times, which can be a lot more stressful, but also you have a lot more control over it.  I’m excited to see what I can do. I’m excited to see what my teammates can do. I think a lot of people have had breakout seasons or are just on this uphill climb. And I think that’s most evident when you get to put a time down on a track, because it’s the same conditions pretty much no matter what. Whereas in cross country, the times are kind of subjective.

WSN:  Not to be a little cheesy, but that sounds like a crazy marathon of a season. How do you keep up with it and also, you know, keep up with your rigorous academics?

Dzeidzic:   I think for me it’s all about like thinking about the future and like, what I want. I mean, we all came to NYU to take these amazing classes with great professors and we all care about our academics as well, so it’s not like we can completely shut down that part. And a lot of my classes, I just have to remember, oh, I’m here because I really care about this. 

Sometimes it’s easier than others, but, oftentimes I find that the same drive that we have for running can be applied to academics. And we work so hard at our sport, and training our bodies to run as fast as possible.  It’s the same thing with academics.  But yeah, definitely foot on the gas a lot of the time.

WSN: I think that’s everything I have to ask. Is there anything you wanna talk about while we’re here?

Dziedzic:  No. I mean, I’m just excited to see how we’re gonna do at nationals. I think we’ve been ready for a while and it’s gonna be, I think it’s gonna be big, so I’m excited.

WSN:  Awesome. Well, thank you for coming, and good luck this weekend, and at nationals.

Dziedzic: Thank you.

Contact Kiran Komanduri at [email protected].