When Rob Castagna resigned in June as Director of Rye High’s Health, Physical Education, and Athletic Department, it was like a moment out of “Ghostbusters:” “Who ya gonna call?”
By Mitch Silver
When Rob Castagna resigned in June as Director of Rye High’s Health, Physical Education, and Athletic Department, it was like a moment out of “Ghostbusters:” “Who ya gonna call?”
Rod Mergardt, who else? The Athletic Director at Fox Lane High School for more than 30 years, Mergardt has been busier in retirement than he ever was punching a time clock. “I thought I was through with education when I was 55. Thinking of starting my own business. Then I got the call.”
The phone call in October 1997, a desperate one, came from the Mamaroneck School District. Their A.D. had just resigned a month into the school year. Could Rod un-retire and help them out on an interim basis? He could and he did.
“It’s crazy — I haven’t applied for a job in 50 years,” he told us. “I was a 29-year-old P.E. teacher and coach in the Bedford system when the Superintendent there informed me I was the new Athletic Director. Then, all these years later, Mamaroneck wanted me to oversee things and hire my successor. After that, it was one call after another.”
The requests for Mergardt to run athletic departments for a year or two came pouring in: from Byram Hills, then Sleepy Hollow, Ridgefield, Connecticut, and, most recently, the Tuckahoe District for the 2013-14 school year. And now, Rye.
What keeps the man in such demand? “Well,” he laughed, “for one thing, I’m available. For another, I’ve been through the wars, so to speak. I was two years into the Fox Lane job when Title IX became the law of the land. I’d go to the Section 1 A.D. meetings with plans on how we would accommodate an expanded program for girls. Some of the old guys took the position that ‘no women are setting foot on my fields.’ Baloney like that. My daughter Peggy was in elementary school and I wanted her to have the opportunities I did.”
A baseball and football player for Brewster High School and a diver in the summer on nearby Lake Tonetta, Mergardt headed off to Notre Dame to study Business and compete for the brand-new Fighting Irish swim team. Bored with his accounting courses, though, he transferred to Cortlandt State. After graduation, and with his wife Barbara and baby daughter in tow, Mergardt got his first job teaching Physical Education at Harrison Avenue Elementary School in 1963.
“Is it okay to say the word ‘Harrison’ around here?” he smiled. “I understand there’s some kind of issue with the place.”
In the summers, when he wasn’t fishing, he patrolled the waterfront at Manursing Island Club. “I know Rye. I like Rye. It’s why I’m here.”
In 1965, Mergardt and his family, which would eventually include sons Michael and Christopher, moved to Bedford, where his new duties would include coaching boys’ and girls’ gymnastics teams. “I was a diver, so all those aerial twists and turns came naturally to me. I would have been an X-Games guy if they had existed back then.”
He shared that his father, who’d taken over the family grocery store in Brewster when his own father got sick, sold the business and got his teacher certification. “We started teaching the same day — Dad in Carmel and me in Bedford. Pretty great.”
So, what plans does he have for Rye and the Garnets?
“Well, first, Rob Castagna left a terrific program in place — he set the bar high —, so we’re going to take our time to search for the next full-time Athletic Director. Then I have a few things. For instance, there’s an athletic performance training regimen, including special speed and strength exercises, that some of our coaches and teams — Lara Vivolo and her rugby players, for one —are going to institute this fall.
“I’d like to bring these programs into the K-12 physical education curriculum. We’re facing a childhood obesity and onset diabetes epidemic in this country, and we need to teach kids how to take care of their bodies. I know academics are crucially important in Rye, so we’ll do what we can to improve with the time we have.”
“Do what we can to improve with the time we have”… it sounds like the new Interim Athletic Director’s job description. One he’s trained all his life to perform.
