Where Are They Now ... With Anna Dishuck
June 18, 2020 | Swimming & Diving
Dishuck married her culinary degree with her chemistry major and works in R&D at Simple Mills
Louisville, Ky – After a week off, Where Are They Now continues this week with swimming and diving assistant coach Kameron Chastain catching up with 2010 graduate and Cardinal Forever Anna Dishuck about her career and where she is today.
"You hear that Louisville is the greatest college sports town in America and I feel like it really is. The fans are great, you have standing room only swim meets, the community is very involved. It's just a fun place to be a college athlete," said Dishuck.
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Hailing from Tuscaloosa, Ala., Anna was the first swimmer from her club team to go to a Division IÂ college. Arthur Albiero was coaching at Alabama when Anna was young and they had met at swim meets when she was young so he was on her mind when thinking about college. Louisville was the first stop on a road trip with her mom the summer before her senior year where she met with the coaches and heard about the new pool being built and the vision of the program which laid the foundation to lead her to Louisville.
"You could tell that the program was trying to do something special and I knew it was something I wanted to be apart of," Dishuck said of the feeling she got on her official visit.
Academically, Dishuck was a chemistry major and didn't initially plan on a food science career. She said both the coaches and the professors were very willing to do what they could to work around my schedule.
Louisville was definitely supportive of their student-athletes." Anna said something that really helped her during her freshman and sophomore years was taking advantage of using the tutors and making athlete and tutor study groups. After graduating from Louisville, she attended culinary school at Sullivan University where she realized she could marry her two degrees into one career.
From her time on the team, Anna said "Watching the team progress, being the first team to beat Kentucky, being the first team to beat Notre Dame in a dual meet. Those are things you don't forget and you can just tell the team was on an upward trajectory."
The thing that sticks out the most to Anna was the progress Louisville made with Olympic Trial qualifiers. There were no Olympic Trial qualifiers her freshman year. She qualified the summer after her freshman year and by 2008 Arthur (Albiero) was talking about having 30 Olympic Trial qualifiers for 2012. She said "It was really cool to be a part of that." Another memory she has from the team was being a part of the first relay to make NCAAs for the women's program in the 200 relay.
"When we made finals, it was this surreal moment of 'ok, we made finals, we can do this.' But just standing behind the blocks being surrounded by Arizona, Texas, Cal, Georgia; those are all schools that none of us were recruited by and to be up there getting ready to compete against them was huge," she said of the experience.
Today, Anna is the research and development manager at Simple Mills out of Chicago. Simple Mills is on a mission to make healthy eating more simple. Anna was drawn to Simple Mills because of their view that food has a large impact on the way you feel day to day which she related to from her time as a swimmer at UofL. She said a really cool project she has worked on was her first project where she had to help come up with a healthy brownie mix option and get it on the shelves in grocery stores in six weeks.
When reflecting on her experience at UofL, Anna said "The bonds that you form in college will stick with you through life. Being a student-athlete is something you will always have and always be proud of."
