Doyel: A Roncalli coach collapsed on the field. His heart stopped. Here's what saved him

INDIANAPOLIS – The night he died, the air was heavy. Vinny Romano remembers that.

He remembers most of the day, up to the point his heart stopped on the football field at Roncalli, his wife and daughter and mother in the bleachers, watching in shock that turns to horror, and his son standing a few feet away.

This happened a few weeks back at a Roncalli lacrosse game, against Center Grove. Vinny Romano, 47, is an assistant coach for the Rebels. His son Vincent is the leading scorer on the team, one of the leading scorers in Roncalli history.

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The night he died, the clouds were suffocating the sun and a thick mist was doing the same to Vinny Romano’s lungs. Felt like breathing through wet strips of gauze. His son was feeling it too, but then Vincent has asthma. It comes and goes, and on this night it comes and he has to walk off the field midway through the first quarter. He’s standing next to his old man, telling him how tight his chest feels, when Vinny says something weird.

“I’m feeling it too,” Vinny tells his son. “It feels like I’m having a heart attack.”

This is the story I’m trying to tell you, about the night Vinny Romano died, but Vinny won’t let me tell it. He’s listening as his son Vincent tells it from his perspective, about the asthma, about coming off the field, about his dad saying those awful words: It feels like I’m having a heart attack.

And now his dad, Vinny, he’s interrupting.

“I didn’t say exactly that,” Vinny says, as if he’d remember. This is the part of the story, a completely true story, where he’s about to die. Dead men have lousy memories. Everybody knows that.

“You said exactly that,” Vincent tells his old man. “And then lo and behold, it happened.”

Vinny drops. On the field at Roncalli, middle of a lacrosse game. Heart attack. No pulse. Gone.

* * *

“Right there,” Doug Schiefelbein says. “There was a miracle right there.”

It's moments before a game against Park Tudor, and we're standing on the sideline at Roncalli, where Schiefelbein operates the scoreboard. He does it from field level, so he was there the night Vinny Romano died. On this night, Schiefelbein is standing where he always stands for games. Now he's walking a few feet, and stopping.

“Right here,” he says.

To die and then live to tell about it, everything has to go right. Something has to go wrong first, of course, and doctors still aren’t sure what went wrong with Vinny Romano the night of April 24. Well, his heart stopped. They know that much. But why? They’re still looking for answers. Doctors found a small clot, but they don't think it was enough to stop his heart. They think it could be a matter of rhythm. They’re still looking.

The night it happened, Sherry Manzelli was watching. She’s an athletic trainer with St. Vincent Sports Performance, one of two who work full-time at Roncalli, part of the school's partnership with St. Vincent. Manzelli has been an athletic trainer for 23 years, the past six at Roncalli. She’s seen some things: broken bones, torn ligaments, spinal-cord scares. But she’d never seen what she saw that night, sitting in a golf cart on the track that circles the Roncalli football field, no more than 30 feet from the spot where Vinny Romano dropped and Doug Schiefelbein saw the miracle that happened next.

Manzelli doesn’t know about miracle, but there’s a word she doesn’t want to hear: Hero.

“I’m no hero,” she says.

“You’re my hero,” Vinny Romano tells her.

“No,” Sherry Manzelli is saying. “That’s the hero.”

She’s pointing at a small case, square with a handle and cloth covering. It doesn’t look particularly heroic. It looks like an oversized lunchbox.

It’s a portable defibrillator, the most unimpressive-looking piece of lifesaving equipment you’ve ever seen. You come to the Roncalli sideline, you talk to the man who died, you stand on the spot where the miracle happened, and then you see this lunchbox. It’s a little deflating.

“This one is 15 years old,” Manzelli is telling me as I’m zipping open the lunch box to find what looks like a laptop inside. “In 15 years it had never been used.”

Good. Nobody wants to use life insurance.

* * *

Let’s start with the coincidence:

Thirty years before she saved Vinny Romano’s life, Sherry Manzelli went to high school with his future wife at Greenfield-Central. Sherry and Angie are 1991 graduates. As sophomores, they worked together at McDonald’s. Would you like fries with that? How about I save your husband’s life in 30 years?

No, the fries are not a hero in this story. From the looks of him, Vinny Romano has eaten a few of them over the years. Well, he has. Vinny’s just this big bear of a man, with an oversized personality to match, charismatic and emotional, the kind of man who goes through life laughing or crying: happy to do one, unafraid to show the other.

“I’m a big guy,” Vinny says, and goes through the heart-attack checklist. “Overweight. Type-2 diabetes. Not as active as I should be. Eating habits? I eat a lot.”

And something just didn’t feel right the night of April 24. Before the game Vinny remembers approaching another Roncalli assistant, Mike Hoffman. They’ve known each other for years, part of the southside deanery where parents send their elementary-age children to Catholic schools such as St. Jude and St. Barnabas, and their teens to Roncalli. Five years ago, Hoffman and Romano started a lacrosse feeder program.

Now, Vinny is telling Hoffman: “Keep an eye on me. My chest kind of hurts.”

That’s the first thing that went right. That comment right there.

“I told him the next day: ‘You saved your own life with the information you provided me,’” Hoffman says. “In all that chaos, I knew what was going on.”

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Before the chaos, Roncalli coach Sean Cross has his team gathered around him between the first and second quarters, as always. He can’t see Vinny, but he never sees Vinny. Vinny is standing behind him. As always.

“He’s basically my wingman,” Cross says. “Also, a fiery Italian.”

Roncalli is scoreless after one quarter. Where’s the fire? Sean Cross is talking, waiting to be interrupted by Vinny, when he’s interrupted by a single player saying a single word, as calm as death itself:

Coach.

That word, that isn’t normal. Cross’ players don’t interrupt him. Not ever. Cross knows how to handle this: He’ll turn to his wingman, to the fiery Italian, and ask Vinny: Who’s interrupting us?

“I turn around, and I didn’t see him, and that’s when I knew: Something bad just happened,” Cross says. “Because I didn’t see him, because he’s always there.”

Vinny had collapsed behind the huddle, and it’s chaos. In the press box, where Angie captures each game on video, she sees her husband on the ground. Now Angie and their daughter Gianna are running down to the field, borderline hysterical. Nothing borderline about Vinny’s son, Vincent.

“I broke down completely,” Vincent says.

Everything is happening so fast. Mike Hoffman sees his friend go down, remembers what Vinny had told him before the game. He’s yelling for someone to call 911 in one breath, and in the next he’s shouting for Manzelli, the athletic trainer from St. Vincent.

No need. Manzelli has been watching, and she sees Vinny go down, and instincts kick in. She’s there in seconds, checking for pulse, checking for breathing, and feeling nothing. She is kneeling next to a man who is no longer alive.

Everything, it just happens so fast. At Roncalli, lacrosse players take a knee whenever someone gets hurt. Instinctively, in unison, the team drops to one knee around its assistant coach.

Parents are rushing out of the bleachers. One sprints to the school, where he knows Roncalli keeps a defibrillator in the theater; he’s unaware the school has three others, one on the sideline. Several parents who work in the medical profession go to the field, including Dr. Scott Gudeman, whose son John plays for Center Grove. To help if needed.

Manzelli is breathing into Vinny’s mouth. One parent, a nurse practitioner named Gina Saylor – Antonio Saylor is a junior on the team – is doing rhythmic compressions on Vinny’s chest. They are working CPR in tandem as Manzelli’s intern, Josh Jones, opens the lunchbox and applies electrodes to Vinny’s ribcage.

As people tend to his father, Vincent Romano is falling apart. Sean Cross sees it. That’s his assistant coach lying on the sideline, but that’s his player in tears. Instinct kicks in. Cross walks Vincent away from the scene. He’s talking gently. He’s saying: “These are the professionals, the ones who are going to make it OK.” He’s saying: “Let’s pray.”

The noise coming from the football field at Roncalli is eerie. The hushed prayers from dozens of boys on a knee. The CPR teamwork of Manzelli and Saylor. And then that lunchbox, that defibrillator, it starts talking.

“Preparing shock,” commands the computerized voice inside the defibrillator. “Move away from the patient.”

* * *

Vinny opens his eyes, but he’s not seeing anything. Not yet. Have you ever died? No? Then you have no idea what it’s like to be Vinny Romano, lying on the football field at Roncalli, blinking your eyes but seeing nothing, not even your dear friend Mike Hoffman as he holds your head and says: “It shocked you. It brought you back.”

Vinny can hear that. He blinks, stares up into the dusk, and it all comes back to him. The mist. The pressure in his chest. The pregame conversation with Hoffman.

“I’m OK,” Vinny says, and keeps saying it. He wants to crack a joke and lighten the mood, but jokes aren’t coming. All he can say: I’m OK.

“I think I said it 100 times,” he says, and his wife is standing right there with us and she’s correcting him:

“A thousand times,” she says.

Everyone’s laughing about the night Vinny Romano died, because that story was just getting started. As it continues, Vinny is blinking and saying “I’m OK" and the siren lets everyone know the ambulance from St. Francis is getting closer. Center Grove coach Drew Calvert is telling Sean Cross and the Rebels: “Coach, guys, if you don’t want to play this game, we’re good, men. We can start over another time.”

The night Vinny Romano died, Roncalli was 0-3. A few days later the Rebels play Brownsburg. Vinny is still in the hospital at St. Francis, still receiving texts and emails from the lacrosse teams at Guerin and Noblesville, from Center Grove parents, from the referee who worked that game, Bud Boughton. He’s looking at an engraved coffee mug they made for him at Center Grove, black with “Coach Romano” and “Roncalli lacrosse” in silver. He’s thinking about the camaraderie of the Indianapolis lacrosse family. He’s wondering about his son.

A few miles away, Vincent is leading his teammates out of the woods and onto the field, storming and sprinting and waving the Roncalli FIVE flag – faith, integrity, values, effort – and then running out of steam. Last time he was on this field, it was a nightmare. During warmups, Vincent Romano takes a seat and composes himself. There’s a game to play, and Roncalli is 0-3. Brownsburg is 7-1.

Vincent scores twice that night, and Roncalli wins 11-7. Next game is at Columbus East, and Vinny is out of the hospital. Doctors say he can resume coaching, but Angie isn’t having it. Not yet. She and Vinny watch from the stands as Vincent scores three more goals. Roncalli wins 12-1.

Vinny is back on the sideline as the wins mount for Roncalli, and the goals for Vincent. Six goals against Columbus North, two against Southport, four against Bloomington North, three against Avon. All Roncalli victories.

This story, right? Pretty soon Roncalli has a six-game winning streak. The Rebels are 6-3 entering their May 11 contest with southside rival Center Grove. It’s the makeup game – yeah, that makeup game – and history says it’s unwinnable. Roncalli has played lacrosse since 2008, and has never beaten Center Grove.

“And they’ve always beaten us soundly,” Sean Cross says. “It’s not much of a rivalry.”

On this night, his team scores in the final minute of regulation to tie the game at 6, and in overtime Roncalli wins in sudden death on a goal by …

Well, you know who scores the game-winner, right? This story can have only one ending, and it gets it: Vincent Romano scores and everyone on the Roncalli team is throwing their gear into the air.

“Like we just won state,” Vincent says.

That was the seventh and final win of the streak, and the season, for Roncalli. Fueled by emotion and now running on fumes, the Rebels drop their final three games, the finale Friday at Brebeuf, to close the season at 7-6. Vincent Romano finishes his career with 80 goals, No. 2 in Roncalli history, none sweeter than the OT winner against Center Grove.

While his teammates are throwing their gear into the air, Vincent drops his and runs to the sideline. He’s holding his dad, and they’re crying, and they’re standing right there. Right where the miracle happened. Right where it kept happening.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.