Rebel 5ive

Rebel 5ive is an interview podcast made by and about Roncalli High School. Its host, Gary Armbruster, introduces himself on air as the school's Director of Alumni and Corporate Relations. The premise is simple, and it holds up. Every guest answers five questions about how life has unfolded since their Roncalli days, which experiences, opportunities and alumni connections moved them forward, and what they learned from the challenges along the way. The guests come from across the school community: graduates, current and past parents, former teachers, coaches and longtime staff. What comes out of that is less career advice than a shared memory project. Sports stories come up again and again. In the Chad Huck conversation, Armbruster reads back a long list of the 1977 graduate's football honors, from all-city to Catholic All-American, and calls him probably the school's first Division I recruit. Cole Toner, a 2012 graduate who went on to Harvard, swaps stories about the woodshed, the gym where the school's last varsity games were played before the move to a new one, and recalls a last-second win at the buzzer over a highly ranked Park Tudor team. The conversation with Marilyn Miles, who taught at Roncalli for 16 years, also turns to a championship game and a fall when the volleyball team won state. Coaching and mentorship make up a second thread. Bill Kuntz describes his time on coaching staffs at Cincinnati and Butler, and the point when he decided that a coach's constant moving was not the life he wanted for his family. Bruce Scifres, who spent 30 years at Roncalli, names Bob Tully as someone he leaned on heavily as a new head coach. Tully has his own episode, 'Rebel 5ive with Bob Tully Pt. 1', where Armbruster introduces him as Vice President of Mission and Ministry and as someone who bridged the schools from Bishop Chartrand to Roncalli. Before any history, Armbruster asks about Tully's first job, and the answer is flyboy for Fawcett Deering. Tully also passes along the old joke that he arrived with the first load of bricks. Faith sits comfortably inside the talk, and the Scifres conversation describes the core job of teachers, coaches and mentors as helping kids get to heaven. The tone is warm and familiar, with breaks between segments and a 'Go Rebels' near the sign-off. At times Armbruster clearly knows the story before the guest finishes telling it. More than one conversation mentions Roncalli's 50 years of history, and that is the series' purpose: getting the school's story on record from the people who carried it. It works best as a yearbook you can listen to.