Valencia College Stories

At Valencia College, Clete Reinberger is working toward a career in the theme park industry, while leading VC’s Brain Bowl team.

— by Linda Shrieves

Clete Reinberger has two passions in life: Theme parks and quiz bowls.  

Those two passions ultimately led him to Valencia College – where he could study hospitality management and work in the world capital of theme parks, while also playing on Valencia College’s Brain Bowl team, which has won nine national titles at the community college level and even competes against top-tier four-year universities.

But the story of how a young man from Cincinnati found his way to Valencia is a little more convoluted.

He is so passionate about theme parks that, while in high school in Cincinnati, he got a job at a nearby amusement park, Kings Island. And he also spent many weekends (when the park was closed during the winter months) pursuing his other passion: Academic quiz bowl. “I had great teammates, and we’d drive to Louisville or Cleveland or South Bend to play in a weekend tournament,” Clete says. 

As for theme parks, that passion started far earlier. “When I was 5 or 6, I watched a video on YouTube that was about the top 10 roller coasters in the country. Everything since then has been all about roller coasters.”

In 2022, Clete started working at Kings Island as a roller coaster operator, but he soon discovered the magic wasn’t just in the coasters. “What I learned about myself and about life is all the enthusiasm you encounter from all the happy people,” he says. “There’s a bunch of strangers in this one place, having fun. And there are another bunch of strangers there, helping you have fun.”

 

 

That was the kind of feeling he wanted to experience every day, he says.  

In fact, he was so captivated by theme parks that, when he was 16, he took the money he’d saved from his summer job at Kings Island and bought a season pass at Universal Studios Florida – and visited on weekends by himself! “I would buy a Frontier flight from Cincinnati to Orlando at 5 a.m. on Saturday, and I would make the latest dinner reservation at CityWalk at 1 a.m. and then I would go straight to the airport for my 5 a.m. flight on Sunday.” 

Why the 24-hour ritual? “You can’t get a hotel when you’re 16, so I would stay at the park as long as I could and catch an hour of sleep at the airport before the flight.”

He made the roller-coaster dash from Ohio to Orlando three or four times each summer for several years. 

And his experiences in Orlando were part of the reason he headed to Valencia College as a freshman, choosing Valencia over colleges including the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and Bowling Green State University in Ohio (near the famed Cedar Point Amusement Park).

But theme parks were only part of the equation. 

“Once I started getting into quiz bowl, I learned about this guy, Chris Borglum, who is an icon in the quiz bowl world,” says Clete, speaking about the Valencia College English professor and Brain Bowl coach. “Household name might be a stretch, but among people who care about the game, Chris Borglum is hugely important.” (Side note: Clete dropped some knowledge on us, informing us that Borglum is one of only 30 people who have won the Academic Competition Federation’s prestigious Carper Award.)

At a tournament in Knoxville, Tenn., Clete met one of Borglum’s quiz bowl friends, who mentioned that he was playing that tournament with Borglum. Clete unwittingly assumed Borglum was the UCF team coach. When Borglum told Clete that he taught and coached at Valencia College, bells went off. 

“I told him I was thinking about going to Valencia, so I kept in touch with him,” Clete said. During his senior year of high school. Clete practiced online with the Valencia Brain Bowl team. 

And the rest is history.

Today, Clete is captain of the Valencia College Brain Bowl team – and is majoring in hospitality. 

 

 

And, ironically, though he was a Universal fan and long-time passholder, Clete landed a gig at Disney after enrolling at Valencia. He started as a park greeter at Magic Kingdom – and picked up work in other parks regularly, sometimes helping at Animal Kingdom, Blizzard Beach and ESPN’s Wide World of Sports. He recently got promoted and is now working in guest relations at EPCOT.

“It has been so tremendous – one of the greatest experiences of my life. I’m learning something every day.”

After Valencia, he plans to transfer to UCF – and beyond that, he’s certain about only one thing: He wants to work in theme park leadership.

“I don’t know if in 20 years I will live in Orlando or Portland, but I hope that I’m working in a park, and I hope that I have not lost my love for it. I cannot imagine that I will.”