If it weren’t for an old friend, Justin Oosterwyk would’ve gone on to join the marching band in high school, except said friend convinced him to give swimming one more try.
Oosterwyk is a graduate student at Seton Hall University who is also on the swim and dive team. He finished his undergraduate major in journalism with a sports media minor, and he is looking to obtain his masters in science in digital media by fall 2024.
He said he wanted to return to Seton Hall to further his education in the radio production side of sports media. He’s looking to pave the way for student athletes who are interested in the sports media field, and he is an example of how it is possible to balance everything on a student athlete's plate.
“You are a student first,” he said. “At some point, not that being an athlete takes a backseat, but you have to remember that at the end of the day, you are coming out of [Seton Hall] with a degree, and you got to find that job, and you got to make a living off of it.”
Oosterwyk has been busy in the classroom, the pool and his internships. He worked with Good Karma Brands, which is a marketing company with ESPN, with SiriusXM Sports programming and at Seton Hall’s radio station, WSOU 89.5 FM. During his time at WSOU, he was a part of the staff when the station won the Marconi Award for Best College Radio Station of the Year.
“I have a bunch of tools in the tool kit,” he said. “As long as you have a little bit of everything, someone is going to want you for one specific set of skills, and that’s going to transfer into wherever I want to go in this industry."
Most notably, Oosterwyk, alongside another student athlete at Seton Hall, Jonatan Luders, a middle infielder on the baseball team, created a podcast for WSOU Sports called “Pirates Overboard,” which is about student athletes and their Seton Hall experience and story as a whole.
Diving back into the pool, it wasn’t always smooth waters for Oosterwyk. He started swimming at the age of five and started swimming for a club team at 10. “I actually quit swimming my eighth grade year,” he said. “Middle school years were a grind.”
Oosterwyk saw huge jumps in his sophomore year of high school, and that’s when he knew he had it and fell in love with the sport all over again. After his sophomore year, he said he knew he wanted to swim in college at a Division 1 level and be a swimmer who made an impact on the team.
“He [Coach Sapp] showed us this big ring from BIG EAST [Championship] 2018 and said, ‘This is what we are trying to win’ and I was like, oh, I would like one of those,” he said on his decision to come to Seton Hall besides the academics.
The jump from high school swimming to college swimming was the hardest transition for Oosterwyk. He said the biggest jump from high school to the collegiate level was weight training, “Just because I didn’t touch a weight in high school.”
Some of Oosterwyk accolades include the 2022 BIG EAST champion in 100 fly, the 2022 BIG EAST champion in 200 medley relay, the 2022 BIG EAST champion in 400 medley relay, and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 ALL-BIG EAST teams.
Once he graduates from Seton Hall, Oosterwyk said he hopes to work in the sports media industry, and he is looking at an opportunity at an ESPN radio journalism job.
Michael Federico submitted this article from his Writing for the Media course. He can be found at michael.federico@student.shu.edu.
