For nearly 100 years, De La Salle Collegiate has helped young men become equipped to deal with the challenges of college and life after college. 

Now, Roger Ziemba, Class of 1972, wants to help his alma mater achieve that very objective for another century and beyond.

Ziemba, who has lived a successful life crunching numbers and breaking down probabilities, wants to help bring the brightest and best math students to De La Salle.

He plans to accomplish this by sponsoring a new, merit-based math competition that will award the top students in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades with either scholarship money or a gift card to the Pilot Hangar – the school's spirit store. 

Specifically, if the winning student at the eighth-grade level plans on attending De La Salle for high school, he will receive a $5,000 scholarship. The scholarship will be renewable for all four years of the student’s career at DLS, contingent upon the child maintaining an “A” grade in his math courses. 

Meanwhile, the second-place winner will receive a $3,000 scholarship to attend DLS, the third-place winner will receive $1,500, and the fourth-place winner will receive $500. Once again, the scholarship money is applicable only to those students who choose to attend De La Salle Collegiate. 

In total, Ziemba will be gifting $10,000 – and $40,000 over four years – to the highest achievers in the aforementioned competition.

Meanwhile, the winners at the sixth-and-seventh-grade levels will receive a $50 gift card to the Pilot Hangar. 

The first-ever edition of this competition will take place Thursday, Oct. 26, at the school's Warren-based campus. DLS Math Department Chair Joe Novak, '03, will run the competition. 

"There's not enough meritocracy in the world. I want to do a small piece, in a small brick in the De La Salle foundation, that rewards merit, and specifically, in something I was good at. So, I picked something that I was good at (math)," Ziemba said of his decision to support the inaugural math competition. "And, it (math) is underappreciated. You cannot be good at science, technology, or engineering – any of the first three STEM components – without being good at math. And, your life will be so much better because of it. 

"You make much better decisions if you understand simple math. I mean, literally high school math, if you understand that, you'll understand statistics and probability, and you'll see the world in a whole different way."

It is why it’s essential, in Ziemba’s opinion, for De La Salle to have the very best math department, consisting of both top-notch educators and students. And, through his gift to the school, he’s hoping to aid DLS in building a roster of top-tier math students, akin to building an NFL roster of high-quality talent. 

“I want to be like (Detroit Lions general manager) Brad Holmes and help build a roster of high-achieving math students at De La Salle,” Ziemba said. 
 
Ziemba’s love for math stems from his days as a Pilot student. In fact, he received a partial scholarship to De La Salle as a result of his math prowess. Ziemba’s sons, Jacob, ‘11, Matthew, ‘09, and Paul, ‘12, also attended DLS, as did Roger’s brother, Terry, '69, and his nephew Patrick Cahill, ‘00.

At DLS, Roger Ziemba also gained a strong admiration for reading and learning. He believes it can be partially attributed to the reading requirement of four different books, including the historical novel “Ivanhoe,” leading into his freshman year. He proceeded to spend three weeks on each book, reading 25 pages per day, helping to instill a strong work ethic in Ziemba.
  
To this day, he remembers the academic rigor of the school fondly and says it prepared him well for the University of Michigan. 

“All my new friends (at Michigan) talked about, ‘Oh, my goodness, how different U-M is,’ and these were guys from Troy and Bloomfield and all these different local, public high schools. And, I said, ‘Me, too. U-M is so much easier than De La Salle,'” a laughing Ziemba said. “And, these guys were going crazy, and I was thinking, ‘Jeez, I’m spending less time academically than I did at De La Salle.’”

Ziemba, in part due to the enriching, faith-filled experience he had as a Pilot student, has become an upstanding father to his three boys and model husband to his wife, Diane. And now, he’s decided to pay it forward and give back to De La Salle in an attempt to help build the next generation of morally grounded, Lasallian men. 

“The more people who immerse themselves in the De La Salle culture, the better off we all are,” Ziemba commented. 

DLS Advancement Director Greg Esler couldn’t be more excited about what Ziemba is doing for Pilots students of today and tomorrow. 

“I can’t thank Roger enough for his tremendous generosity and the terrific impact he is set to make on the De La Salle Math program and so many different Pilots students for years to come,” Esler said. “I say with no hesitation that De La Salle is extremely blessed to call Roger one of its own.”

Novak also is grateful for Ziemba and the immense and long-lasting impact that his gift will have on the DLS Math Department. 

“Roger, through his ultra-generous gift, is going to help take the De La Salle Math Department to the next level,” Novak said. “He’s going to assist in putting even more of the brightest and best math students into the seats at De La Salle. Subsequently, I believe Roger is making a huge impact on not only the school’s math program but also on De La Salle as a whole.”    

De La Salle continuously strives to be the best college preparatory school in the state of Michigan, and because of alumni like Ziemba, that goal is an attainable one.