Hometown Report: Turlock’s Romeo walking on via his own path

There has been a distinct pattern to Dominic Romeo’s life.

Step one: He decides he wants to do something.

Step two: Quietly, he figures out how to reach that goal, often without telling anyone.

Step three: He accomplishes it.

It’s an approach that has taken the 22-year-old Pitman High grad to the University of Notre Dame, where he walked onto the football team as a sophomore despite not having pulled on pads since his freshman year of high school.

While there, he also nearly stole a race for student body president, founded the school’s first Chinese language club and spent a semester in China before graduating magna cum laude last spring with a double major in Chinese and political science.

And in his spare time, he completed a marathon.

Whew.

It gets better.

Last spring, at the suggestion of a roommate, he decided to combine grad school with playing basketball. At 6-foot-6 and 240 pounds, he threw his efforts back onto the court and was named MVP of Notre Dame’s Bookstore Basketball – the world’s largest outdoor five-on-five tournament. He put together a highlight tape and marketed himself simultaneously to Division I basketball programs and the graduate programs at those schools.

And that’s how Romeo ended up walking onto the roster of another Division I sport at a second school, this time as a backup forward at the University of Santa Clara while working on his graduate degree in theology. Walk-on athletes are full members of the team but do not receive athletic scholarships.

“He had a few options about where he was going to play, but he wanted to do Division I basketball,” said his father, Dr. Mike Romeo, the president of the family-run Romeo Medical Clinic in Turlock. “Nothing was random about the process. The first step was to be a walk-on, then next was to be on the travel squad, which he’s accomplished, and the third was to be relevant on the team. He’s loving it. He’s not getting the time he’d like, but he’s enjoying the whole process.”

Dominic Romeo has seen action in three games for the Broncos and has scored five points while grabbing two rebounds for coach Kerry Keating. Yes, right now now he’s the last guy off the bench. On the other hand, he has a seat and a shot.

“I’m getting some playing time here and there,” he said. “But my role right now is at practice, where I never let the circumstances – how long we’re out there or how tired I am – deflate my outlook. I try to be high energy and push everybody else to be as good as they could be. I got this idea from a roommate, and the reason it didn’t fall away is because my parents were supportive, and that was because they knew I had the work ethic to make it possible.”

Of course they knew. The Romeo family has seen this before.

There was that phone call about three years ago, when Dominic informed the family he was going to play football for Notre Dame.

“I was blown away, but I can’t say I was shocked,” Mike Romeo said. “Dom always had his own way about things. Even when he was young, he watched what he ate and never told anybody why. If anyone else had told me they were going to play football at Notre Dame, I would have been surprised; but it’s just another one of those things from Dom. From the time he was 2 years old, when he decided he was going to do something, he found a way to get it done.”

The walk-on process at Notre Dame began with a questionnaire – more or less a screening résumé where the prospective athlete states his case as to why he thinks his presence could benefit Irish football.

“I had a big body and was relatively athletic,” Dominic Romeo said. “I was bigger than most of the guys trying to walk on, and in training with a friend, I got my 40-yard-dash time to 4.8 seconds. Five of us got calls back and all five of us made the team.”

At the time he filled out the application, he was 235 pounds. By the end of spring practice, through eating and lifting, he was up to 255 and was listed on the roster as a 245-pound sophomore defensive end. He made the team, but that wasn’t going to be enough. He wanted to play, and among the athletes ahead of him on the depth chart were future NFL players Aaron Lynch (San Francisco) and Stephon Tuitt (Pittsburgh).

“I wasn’t going to be satisfied just being on the team,” said Romeo, whose family was in the stands at Notre Dame Stadium to watch him play in the Blue-Gold spring game. “Eventually, my goal was to beat these guys out. Yeah, it was a long shot, but I always make lofty goals because if you don’t reach them, you always can enjoy the journey.”

Ironically, a journey is what ended his football career before he hit the field for a regular-season game. The 2012 season would see the Irish go undefeated until losing to Alabama in the national championship game, but Romeo was on the other side of the world, having chosen instead to study like a champion.

Romeo received a grant to spend the semester in Beijing, and – already fluent in Mandarin – jumped at the chance to return to a country he learned to love during a nine-week trip following high school graduation.

“The opportunity to study abroad came up, and I’ve always really been into my academics,” he said. “When I was there the summer before my freshman year at Notre Dame, I really fell in love with the culture.”

Back on campus, Romeo had the chance to return to football but was sidelined by a recurring hernia problem. Since he knew he would not be fully healthy for quite awhile, he left the team and dove right into campus culture.

That meant, again almost on a whim, running for student body president.

“I wanted to run, but didn’t file the paperwork until three days before the paperwork was due,” he said. “The other guy was a major favorite and I had just gotten back from China, but still managed to get 700 signatures in three days. We ended up as one of two finalists, ran a crazy campaign and lost the runoff by 4 percent.”

Romeo wasn’t president but remained very active. He founded Notre Dame’s first Chinese language club and was voted president of the university’s political science honors society.

One year later, he regained his passion for basketball.

“I was playing intramurals and it occurred to me that this might be the last time I play competitive basketball, and that made me sad,” Romeo said. “My teammate suggested I try to play somewhere in my last year of college. I had just run a marathon, so I was in shape and I was as good as I’d ever been.”

He sent more than 150 emails to college basketball programs, then followed up with videos to those coaches who showed interest.

One of those was Keating, who himself was a former walk-on, having made the team at Seton Hall University in New Jersey in 1989, the year after the Pirates reached the national championship game under coach P.J. Carlesimo.

“I really didn’t know anything about him,” Keating said. “He initiated all the talk with the coaches in the spring and usually all of that happens in the fall. We like to keep four to five guys on the roster who can help us in practice, but usually those guys are guards. With Dominic’s size, we saw he could help us, and that’s been the case.

“He’s been great for the team. We have six freshmen and three sophomores, and Dominic gets them to understand how all the little things are important.”

His presence on the Broncos also has facilitated some Romeo family get-togethers under the banner of the West Coast Conference. His older brother, Nicolas, is attending grad school at St. Mary’s, while little sister Samantha is at Gonzaga. The youngest of the clan, Daniel, is a senior playing basketball at Central Catholic.

“He’s the old man of the team, and a lot of these kids are his little brother’s age,” Mike Romeo said. “Dom doesn’t smoke or drink. He teaches Bible study. At 22, he’s a dad on the team, and I think he’s offering a lot to the team off the court.”

But, of course, Dominic Romeo wants more than that. He wouldn’t be on the team if he didn’t think he could work his way into a playing role. And because an injury forced his withdrawal from the football team at Notre Dame, he’s petitioning the NCAA for another year of athletic eligibility.

“If I get that, I’ll stick here for another year,” he said. “If not, I’ll either finish my master’s here or apply for a grant to study again in China.”

Yes, he’s always planning. But this time, there’s a finite goal at the end of the classroom.

“Ultimately, I’m going to be a doctor serving the developing world,” he said.

Because even in the developing world there always will be another team ready to welcome a motivated walk-on.

This story was originally published January 31, 2015 at 7:27 PM with the headline "Hometown Report: Turlock’s Romeo walking on via his own path."