USF Athletics caught up with Cougar football alum and former NAIA All-American linebacker Dominic Studzinski, who is currently a strength and conditioning graduate assistant coach at the University of Southern Mississippi. The Golden Eagles are ranked no. 22 in the most recent AP poll and will face Nevada in the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl on Christmas Eve.
1. Have you caught
any deep balls from Brett Favre yet?
DS: No, but he's definitely around. He's a huge supporter of
all Southern Miss teams and even broadcasted one of our football games this
fall. You get used to seeing him on
campus.
2. OK, on a more serious note. How did you wind up at Southern Miss?
DS: I completed two strength and conditioning internships in
college, with Notre Dame and LSU, and was ready to take the next step with my
career. I went back and forth until I finally decided that I was done with
playing football. Paul Jackson, who was LSU's assistant strength and
conditioning coach when I was an intern, took the head job at Southern Miss and
he gave me a call. We reconnected and I had been in a great situation at LSU.
So here I am. It's a fantastic opportunity and for me, in any job it's huge to
like the people you work for. I love my job.
3. What's your
official title and what degree are you pursuing?
DS: I am the Graduate Assistant Strength & Conditioning Coach
and I cover volleyball, women's soccer and assist with baseball and football. I
am studying for a master's of science degree in human performance.
4. How did the first
semester of graduate school treat you?
DS: It went very well. Being a football player at USF
definitely taught me how to manage my time. We had to balance practice,
lifting, film sessions, travel, etc., with classes and schoolwork so I'm good
at getting stuff done and not procrastinating. I'm also able to take classes
online, which lets me finish assignments late at night or early in the morning
before 6 a.m. workouts with athletes. I'm on track to graduate in a year and a
half.
5. What's your
career goal?
DS: You know, it depends on where the road goes. There are
not always a lot of job openings for strength and conditioning coaches, so I
just want to work hard and let the road take me wherever it goes. I really
enjoy working with college student athletes, but if something came up with
professional athletes or with a pro team in the future, I might test those
waters. You never know.
6. Describe
Hattiesburg, Mississippi in seven words or less.
DS: It's warm. Sunny. Very different from Wisconsin.
7. Do the guys on
the Southern Miss football team know that you played a little bit of football
yourself?
DS: They know. The guys asked a lot of questions when I
first got here, and obviously had access to Google, so they read up on the
record of my high school team, and about my USF career, the four national
championship games and the conference and national titles and stuff. It's the offensive linemen that want to do
the one-on-one drills with me after practice.
8. Speaking of, have
you had any opportunities to put the pads back on, in practice or just playing
around?
DS: Not at all. I'm a coach now. That being said, I would
love to play on the scout team every day if there weren't rules against it.
9. Was it hard at
first to be on the sidelines, as a coach and no longer a player?
DS: It was really hard at our first home game versus
Louisiana Tech. I felt like a caged dog on the sidelines; I had all this energy
and emotion that I wasn't able to release on the field. But I learned that
running along the sidelines and screaming at the refs is a great way to unleash
some of that energy.
10. What was it like, as a member of the coaching staff,
playing spoiler and knocking no. 6 Houston out of a BCS bowl on national
television?
DS: All season long, we've had the saying: "They don't
know." We knew that a lot of teams would
view us as the underdog and we embraced that label; it proved to that "they
didn't know" who we were and what the team was capable of doing on the field.
The Conference USA championship game against Houston was amped up-expectations
were high and we were focused on doing all the little things rights, like a
national championship game at USF. We were excited after the win and everyone
took a few moments to embrace the moment and the conference championship, but
we were preparing for the bowl game later that night. A win against Nevada in
the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl would give Southern Miss the first 12-win season in
the history of the program, and that's what we're focused on now.
11. How did this season compare to your career at USF; compare, if you can, winning a D-I conference
championship and going to a bowl game to winning one of your two national
championships as a Cougar.
DS: It's different, but in a lot of ways it's also very
similar. Obviously, D-I has bigger stadiums, bigger teams, bigger coaching
staffs, more travel-it's just built on a larger scale than the NAIA football
model. But, I think that in terms of passion, emotion and energy, it's exactly
the same. You see the same level intensity on the sidelines in NAIA and D-I,
the players at both levels are flying around and working just as hard to make
plays A lot of the players have asked me the same question, if D-I and NAIA
football is the same, if one is better, etc. I tell them that NAIA football is
just different. There's a part in the movie that Jason Dannelly made about the
2010 NAIA championship game, where they talk about how USF was one of the eight
teams in the country, across all levels of football, competing for a national
championship. That's how I feel. I'm an
NAIA linebacker who won four straight GPAC titles, played in four national
championship games and won two titles; that's something I will always be very
proud of.
12. I know you watched this season of Cougar football from a
distance, what are your thoughts about how the transitional season went?
DS: I wasn't able to watch the games, since I was working at
our football games or covering my other sports, but I still talk to Eric
Anderson and some of the other guys. The losses were tough, especially the loss
up at UND, but I think they proved that we will be able to compete at the NCAA
D-II level. It will be interesting to see what happens in the Northern Sun Conference
next season. I wish the guys all the best and hope that they keep the COO
football traditions that still mean a lot to the older guys.
