After a year of hard work publishing articles ranging from school events to current affairs to cultural opinion pieces, The Roundup held its annual banquet on May 25, 2023, to celebrate and reward those who contribute to the success of the paper. This year was also special, as it was Mr. Asche’s final year with the paper. So we wanted to make sure to celebrate him in a special way.
The banquet opened with remarks from the Editor-In-Chief, Logan Thompson ’24. The remarks ranged from talking about the great year of the paper, thanking our moderators, and recognizing our guests of the night. We were lucky to have so many past leaders of the Roundup in our presence, including but not limited to:
- Robert Uhl ’11 – our first Editor-in-Chief, accompanying future Jesuit, Hyland Uhl
- Pierce Durham ’14 – former sports editor and author of scandalous articles
- Michael Lanham ’15 – Managing Editor 2015
- Will Aberger ’17 – former two-time Managing Editor 2017
- Michael Miramontes ’18 – Managing Editor 2018
- Josh Betanzos ’18
- Trey Ashmore ’20 – EIC 2020
- Jack Corrales ’20 – Managing Editor 2020
- Blake Woodard – EIC 2022
- Ajay Bhavan – Managing Editor 2022
Following Logan’s opening remarks, the audience was welcomed to a fajita dinner graciously provided by Thomas Cuisine, the provider of all of Jesuit’s food needs. Along with the fajitas were rice, condiments, salad, and dessert which consisted of cookies and a cake dedicated to Mr. Ashe for his great service to The Roundup.
During the dinner portion of the evening Jesuit students were introduced to The Roundup’s first Editor-In-Chief, Robert Uhl. Robert Uhl is the author of many distinctive chunks and papers inside the CEA , many of which students are tasked with memorizing as examples for memory quizzes. Many view the ordeal of memorizing his writing as a rite of passage into the more challenging of Jesuit works inside the CEA. While I cannot speak for all inside The Roundup, having been apart of the Robert Uhl Fan Class under Dr. Degen, it was truly inspirational to meet the man responsible for many hours of torture, and I aspire to continue the tradition to my future Jesuit brothers.
Michael Miramontes’ Keynote Speech
After the treat of meeting Dr. Degen’s Honors English II E Block’s hero, we heard from the keynote speaker of the banquet, Michael Miramontes, Managing Editor during the 2017-18 school year. A Notre Dame 2022 graduate, Michael majored in Biology and minored in Anthropology. At Notre Dame, he was involved in the Symphonic Winds Concert Band, Medical Observers Club, senior class council, Ultimate Frisbee Club, and the Scientia medical research journal. He has participated in research internships at UT Austin and UT Southwestern and worked for a year in healthcare consulting for a small company in Chicago called Analytics8. He will start his first year of medical school at UT Austin this fall.
He spoke about his experiences in The Roundup and how they helped to shape him into the person he is today. He opened with some of his more infamous articles, first his word-for-word typed-up copy of his interview with a student, and second with his April fools article pranking those to believe Jesuit to Allow Female Applicants which caused confusion and disorder amongst the community, which he found quite comical. He followed that by speaking about how being in The Roundup allowed him to broaden his horizons and taught him to stay determined to finish the things he sets his mind to, which he says helped him through college. He finished with some advice to the current members of the paper, to enjoy our experience and take full advantage of the opportunity Jesuit is giving us.
The full transcript of his speech is at the bottom of the article.
After his speech, Logan introduced the senior leadership of The Roundup for next year:
Editor-In-Chief: Logan Thompson ’24
Managing Editor: Anthony Nguyen ’24
Viewpoint Editor: Peter Loh ’24
News Editor: Griffin Taber ’24
Sports Editor: Peyton Bristow ’25
Media Editor: Austin Keith ’24
Recognitions
It is a unique opportunity we have this upcoming year, as almost all members of the senior leadership are serving in the same position, which will hopefully allow for a very successful year come this fall!
After announcing the next year’s leadership, Kevin Babu ’23 recognized some members of The Roundup for their contributions to the paper:
The Jesuit Roundup awards the Rising Star Award to Sebastian Suwanda ’26. This award acknowledges his remarkable growth, enthusiasm, and potential in his contributions to the Roundup.
The Jesuit Roundup awards the Cross-Disciplinary Writing Excellence Award to Benjamin Woodard ’25. This award recognizes his exceptional writing that spans multiple fields and demonstrates excellence in blending the realms of tennis, medical society, and campus ministry.
The Jesuit Roundup awards the Outstanding Film Critic Award to Thomas Fino ’25. This award recognizes his consistently exceptional film reviews, providing insightful and thought-provoking analysis into movies such as the Matrix and Black Adam.
The Jesuit Roundup awards the Cultural Commentary Award to Lachlan Broad ’25. This award recognizes his ability to provide impactful commentary on various cultural topics, including everyday differences between the US and Australia.
The Jesuit Roundup awards the Best High School Sports Coverage Award to Griffin Taber ’24. This award recognizes his excellent coverage of high school sports, demonstrating in-depth knowledge in sports such as Varsity Baseball and Varsity Lacrosse.
The Jesuit Roundup awards the Diamond Classic Coverage Award to Dillon Brandt ’24. This award recognizes the writer who delivered exceptional coverage and analysis of both the Baseball World Series and various softball tournaments.
The Jesuit Roundup awards the College and Professional Sports Excellence Award to Peyton Bristow ’25. This award celebrates the writer who provided great insight into college and professional sports, especially in college football.
The Jesuit Roundup awards the Best Photojournalism Award to Austin Keith ’24. This award acknowledges the photographer who consistently captures powerful and impactful images, such as his exploration into the various messages and depth behind several photographs.
The Jesuit Roundup awards the Best Feature Writing Award to Anthony Nguyen ’24, This commend his consistently engaging and captivating feature stories, including coverage of several convocations, proms, and other notable events.
The Jesuit Roundup awards the Best Breaking News Coverage to Peter Loh ’24. This recognizes his consistently accurate, timely, and comprehensive coverage of breaking news stories, especially his coverage over the Ukraine war.
The Jesuit Roundup awards the Excellence in Opinion Writing Award to Nick Morris ’23. This commends his consistently presented thought-provoking and well-argued opinions, including his wide-ranging satire pieces.
Finally, the Jesuit Roundup awards the UFC Coverage Excellence Award to Luke Asche ’23. This award recognizes his exceptional coverage of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, showcasing his in-depth knowledge of the mixed martial arts event.
Section Articles of the Year
Next on the award lists were section awards. Each section editor picked nominees for the section article of the year and winners were announced at the banquet.
News Article of the Year: Jesuit Priest Profile: Fr. Anthony Corcoran by Ben Woodard
Viewpoint Article of the Year: Looming Recession’s Complications for the US and Global Economies by Anthony Nguyen
Sports Article of the Year: Inside Unified Sports: Softball
Durham Awards
To end the awards, The Durham Award winners were announced. First awarded in 2016, the Durham Family Award honors and acknowledges Jesuit juniors and seniors for their multiple-year commitment to The Roundup, both in producing content and providing significant leadership to the newspaper staff. The award underscores the contributions of the three Durham sons who played a primary role in establishing and developing the online newspaper, along with Suzanne and Clark Durham who donated generously of their time and treasure to support the early growth of The Roundup. The three Durham men served in key leadership roles:
Clark Jr ‘12 [editor-in-chief]
Pierce ‘14 [News editor; Best Video in The Dallas Morning News Contest;]
Jack ‘16 [Sports Editor, both his junior and senior years]
Together, these young men wrote 153 articles for the newspaper. Four Durham Awards were granted this year, each for $2000 applied to next year’s tuition. For this year’s Durham family scholarship, the winners are:
Sophomore Ben Woodard
Junior Austin Keith
Junior Anthony Nguyen
Junior Griffin Taber
To end the night we celebrated the career of Mr. Asche and thanked him for his contributions to the paper. A tribute video was made and played for him talking about some of his more well-known and favorite articles, as well as some of The Roundup’s favorite memories with him. As mentioned previously, there was also a cake to celebrate career. After the video, Dr. Degen gave him a gift of several books to read on behalf of Roundup.
To close the night we ended in prayer. Thank you all for a successful Roundup year and on behalf of The Roundup, we thank you for your viewership and hope to see you next year.
Michael Miramontes’ Speech
Hello students, my name is Michael Miramontes, class of 2018, and I am humbled to be speaking in front of y’all today. I just wanted to start off by saying Thank you to Dr. Degen for inviting me here, as well as all of you students for participating in something as great as The Roundup. So, I’m sure many of you are probably wondering who am I, besides my last name if y’all know Mrs. Miramontes, so I can start by giving a little background about myself.
When I was a student here, I was a Junior Editor, now Associate Editor I believe?, editor, and my senior year I was the Managing Editor and worked with Connor Thomas, the
Editor in Chief at the time. With experiences like the Roundup on my resume, I applied and got into several incredible Universities, including the one I eventually ended up at, the
University of Notre Dame. I graduated in 2022 with a Major in Biology and a minor in Anthropology, and this past year I have worked as a healthcare consultant for a small company in Chicago called Analytics8 while I applied to medical school. Now, starting this July, I will be attending Dell Medical School at UT Austin. It was through the Roundup
that I felt I was able to really push my comfort zone and get to hear so many different stories and meet so many people in the Jesuit community.
What got me into the Roundup was actually just being around some older students who were in it, and recommended it to me. I was also in the band, as were people like Martin Flores, Dominic Ianelli, Bass Stewart, all people who ended up in high positions such as Editor in Chief. My first article was interviewing a student who had an art showing, and I was so naive and unclear about the writing process at the time that I actually just interviewed the student, and then word for word wrote the full interview in the article, it ended up being like 1500 words and just so unnecessarily long with no creativity,
but hey it worked for me. As a student though, my favorite articles to write were fun, lighthearted articles about the Jesuit community or satirical, funny articles. One of my favorites was an article that was titled “Top 9 Last Minute Christmas Gifts by the Roundup,” and all it was was an excuse to show off all of the cool branded gear that the Roundup offered like the Tie and the Thermos and all, and jokingly talk about how great they looked, and at the end I said if you wanted to get them for yourself or for a friend, they were actually all free gifts, all you had to do was write for the Roundup! So just jokingly advertising the Roundup, but also just got to take a bunch of modeling photos with the other seniors and it was just a fun time overall. My other favorite, and potentially most
infamous article, was one I wrote titled “Jesuit to be Accepting Female applicants?” It was a continuation of the classic “April Fools joke” article, and I thought it would be a really clever idea to trick people into thinking Jesuit was making this big change. It started off with a realistic court case ruling, and included fake quotes from Mr. Earsing and Mr. Kanize, and at the very end is when it said April Fools. The creation of the story was very informal though, as I wrote the article the day before while I was in Chicago visiting family, and kind of rushed it through the editing process to have it released on time. People really seemed to enjoy it. I had students posting the article on their snapchat stories and alumni posting about it in their facebook group chats, Earsing got a lot of calls that week. I had a really great time writing that article, really did. So if I could give any little advice to current students about writing articles, one thing I would say is find a topic that excites you, whether it’s movies, music, satire, community life, the lacrosse team, whatever, find a
topic that you really like and write about it, then it won’t seem as much like a chore, and you’ll have a lot more fun doing it.
A little side note, one article I always wanted to write and never got around to it is an article that goes around all of the Jesuit campus, and tries every water fountain there is and ranks them all. I thought that would be a fun article that would just bring a little debate and would be entertaining to write for sure. So if any of you students out there need an idea for an article, you can thank me.
But regardless, Dr. Degen didn’t ask me to speak here just to talk about articles I’ve written or ideas. I want to talk about my life beyond high school, and how the Roundup has
been instrumental in my development not just as a student, but outside of college as well.
Firstly, The Roundup helped me understand what it’s like to be a part of something bigger than myself. Coming from middle school at age 14 and starting in the Roundup as a
freshman, I would say that it was the first time that I really worked on something that wasn’t simply just for me. I had deadlines and wrote articles that would be reaching a whole community. It wasn’t the same as working on Algebra homework and pushing it off or doing bad on it, because I slowly realized the work I do would be published in the home
page of The Roundup, for the world to see. This idea of serving a larger purpose reappeared in many ways for me, but most importantly with the way I viewed research. During my time at Notre Dame, I interned at places like UT Austin and UT Southwestern in the summer, and worked in a breast cancer lab for 2 years on campus. There would be days where I would come in from 9am to 7pm passaging cells and running PCR tests, or weeks that I might have three exams but was still scheduled to go into lab and do mice dissections. It wasn’t always easy or convenient, and certainly took up a lot of time. But right after I graduated my research mentor was able to publish a research paper that outlined potential therapeutic targets for breast cancer. It was because of my help and the help of many others that we were able to produce a unique finding that could potentially help cancer patients. Knowing that my work was contributing to something greater served as my motivation to push me through and donate my time and efforts to research, a concept that began with the Roundup. In a sense it’s not only motivational but gratifying,
knowing that the story you might be writing at 11pm on a Wednesday isn’t just for Dr. Degen to read, but families and friends of Jesuit alike.
On a much similar note, the Roundup also taught me how to manage others, as well as how to work as a team. Like I said before, the Roundup is something bigger than one
writer, and it takes everyone’s cooperation to make the paper run. We’ve all gotten that text from a beat writer or an editor asking why we haven’t written our article yet, or maybe
you’re older and you are the one sending the text. All of the after school meetings, lunch-time talks, conversations with other writers, it all takes teamwork and cooperation. I know
when I was Managing Editor I felt we had a particularly difficult year recruiting students and getting some of our current seniors and juniors engaged and doing their jobs, which led us to exploring other options and promoting more underclassmen to higher positions because they were the ones that were willing to do more for the newspaper. It’s that type
of management and problem-solving that has helped me in many capacities. My senior year I was on class council at Notre Dame, and part of my job was organizing service and
spiritual events. Working with others meant knowing when to talk, and more importantly, knowing when to listen. I also mentioned that this past year I’ve been working as a
healthcare consultant in my gap year, and this is something that is extremely pertinent I feel. So while I have been interested in medicine and have a lot of stories relevant to
that, this past year I got a taste of what it is like in the corporate world, which I’m sure some of you are probably leaning that way as well. With my most recent project before I
left the company, I was the project manager, which meant that I had to tell other people what to do. It’s a unique situation to be in, especially when everyone was my colleague and, honestly, many of them knew more than I did. Regardless though, it reminded me of my days as a managing editor, and I had to approach colleagues with respect and understanding when talking about our goals, but also know when to be more assertive if things weren’t getting done, as I’m sure it sounds familiar to many of you editors. The Roundup is all about working together towards a common goal, and that requires
cooperation that you learn here and take with you throughout college and beyond.
The last quality that I really feel the Roundup excels in forging is discipline and self-accountability. You won’t be a successful writer in the Roundup if you can’t hold yourself
accountable and get work done on your own merit. And it’s not just getting work done either, it’s seeking out opportunities for success and trying new things. My Editor in Chief Connor Thomas I felt was really good at this. One example of this was the Roundup podcast. A Roundup podcast wasn’t anything revolutionary at the time, as I know people had tried it in the past, but Connor was really enthusiastic about the idea, and took it to a whole new level with the people he interviewed and the stories he covered, and it wasn’t because anyone told him. He just wanted to venture out and find something new to
work on. The same could be said about my April Fool’s article, just another example of something that I wasn’t asked to do, but I had an idea and went with it. During the Covid-19 pandemic, medical opportunities were scarce, so I had to be creative and find other opportunities, which led me to be a Covid-19 contact tracer for the city of Dallas for a period of time, or to reach out on my own to professors at Notre Dame and offer to work in their lab until one finally said yes. Discipline is one of the most important things you can have, and it was essential in my time at Notre Dame while balancing things like MCAT studying with coursework, a part-time job, band, and other club priorities. It meant having
to say no to Friday night plans, waking up at 7 am on a Saturday to take a 6-hour long practice MCAT exam, and staying focused and keeping my goals at the forefront. Even
this past year with applying to medical school, I didn’t have anyone like my parents or Dr. Degen telling me I needed to write primary applications or secondary essays for the medical schools I was applying to. I set my own deadlines, made myself get up to write, to work on essays during the weekends and late at night. It wasn’t easy, but I’m proud I did it and it got me to where I am today. And don’t get me wrong, I know it might just seem like I am advertising how amazing and great I am, but that’s far from it. I struggled in Organic
Chemistry, I procrastinate, I pretty much finished this speech today. But one thing I’ve always prided myself in is that if I tell myself I will get something done, I will, even if it means staying up late or sacrificing other time. I can hold myself accountable in that way, and it’s a lesson I feel is taught everyday with The Roundup.
I hope that I haven’t rambled on too much, but If I could give any advice to y’all, looking back at my time at Jesuit, it would be to make the most of your time, especially with classmates. Go out of your comfort zone, meet people you don’t know, spend time in common areas, go to sporting events. And for those graduating, make an effort to stay in
touch with friends. It will make a big difference down the road.
Just in general, I feel like the Roundup, although just a club and another responsibility at times, inadvertently instills in us the skills and professionalism that are synonymous with successful people, skills that many other students might not learn until they get to college or beyond. The Roundup was important to me because I feel it serves as a vehicle for expedited maturity, preparing me, and all of you as well, for the real world by imprinting in us qualities of selflessness, teamwork and team-management, and accountability. Thank you again for your time, and thanks for the great work you all are doing for the Newspaper.
