One thing I did learn from the DS is that the varsity athletes are excused for a good chunk of PS. In fact the football players have been living somewhere else for the last two weeks. They also did not participate in the Parade.
I certainly understand the need for Navy to have a fully prepared D1 athlete so that the product they put forth is good. However how does play into the mission of the USNA to create future officers?
I am not posting to offend or create a hot topic as I work with USNA alum who played football and was an effective Naval officer post commission.
Any athletes in season (very precisely defined) will be on the excusal list for parades and some other military evolutions, because they are in the in-season grind of heavy practices, weight room training, team training, etc. They will spend exhausting hours doing this, many days in a row, weeks at a time, Saturday practices too, missing class and having to make up work, and returning to the Hall long after their non-varsity classmates have hit the books - that’s what Div I takes, and in its own way, builds stamina, grit, time-management skills, followership, leadership, esprit de corps, and physical-mental boundary-pushing in pursuit of a goal.
I’ll leave the discussions on whether the evolution of the DOD SAs into Div I schools with everything that brings is a good or bad thing, as there are several threads on that. It is clear to me though, from what I observed, the lessons learned and time spent playing a varsity sport at USNA usually supported the development of some critical officer skills, such as performance under pressure and the ability to compartmentalize and focus on execution of the task at hand. Instead of detailers pushing them, they have coaches riding them. All 4 years.
It does breed an us v. them, sadly. I know what I observed in my years as Officer Rep with the women’s basketball team, how exhausted they would be on the bus coming back from a game on a school night, trying to do homework on the bus, knowing they had quizzes the next day on just a few hours sleep, and practice again in the afternoon. They weren’t doing it because they thought they had a pro future, they did it for the love of the game, for wearing the Navy uniform, to push themselves their hardest mentally and physically, because they had a drive to excel in this way - knowing some of their classmates would sit back and talk snark about their privileged lives. And they could simply walk away, ditch the whole thing, without any loss of their ability to gain a college degree and commission - but most don’t. I would cheerfully serve with someone with those qualities.
As I said, I’ll leave it to the grads to discuss pros and cons of how varsity sports has evolved over the last several decades. DH played baseball, back in the 20th C., and they played the Ivies, Army, Air Force, some nearby smaller schools. No league.
