ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Late Friday afternoon at the United States Naval Academy, under impossibly blue skies, alumni, tourists, parents, townsfolk and military brass gathered around Worden Field to inspect the Brigade of Midshipmen.
This is where, in 1893, Army and Navy staged the fourth of their 124 football clashes. This is where the Academy honors Admiral John Lorimer Worden, commanding officer of the ironclad USS Monitor during the Civil War’s Battle of Hampton Roads.
And this is where, on the day before a home football game, the USNA stages a dress parade. And with the Navy’s 250th anniversary later this month, and the respect the undefeated Midshipmen have for Saturday’s opponent, service academy rival Air Force, the parade resonated even more.
The crowd watched reverently as the hour-long ceremony began with four members of the parachute team skydiving onto the grounds. Then came the silent drill team, followed by the drum and bugle corps, the Naval Academy band and the entire brigade, more than 4,000 strong, marching in dress uniform.
Seated in the first row of the reviewing stand were Academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. Michael Borgschulte, Commandant Capt. Gilbert Clark, Air Force Academy Superintendent Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind and Carlos Del Toro, a USNA graduate and Secretary of the Navy from 2021-25.
In the second row were Navy athletic director Michael Kelly, his wife, Lisa, and other guests.
“To me, it’s the pageantry of the whole thing,” said Kelly, on the job since June. “… It’s just neat the way it goes next-level. It’s still a traditional, awesome college football (weekend) that you see in many places. But then what you see what it represents and see the whole student body marching together and cheering together, and then all the alums behind them, it’s just unique and special. It just reminds you that you’re here for a bigger mission.”
Kelly’s affection for that mission dates to his youth.
The son of 1967 Naval Academy graduate Dennis Kelly, Michael grew up in Annapolis and suburban Washington, D.C. He rolled down the hill during football games at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium with the other local kids and later attended St. John’s College High School in the District, back when its Junior ROTC training was mandatory.
Navy athletic director Michael Kelly, right, shown with Under Armour founder Kevin Plank, is the son of a 1967 Naval Academy graduate and grew up in Annapolis, Maryland. (Courtesy/Navy)
Even as he fast-tracked in the sports administration business, from organizing an NCAA Final Four in Tampa and Super Bowls in Tampa, Jacksonville and Miami, to serving as the ACC’s senior associate commissioner for football, the College Football Playoff’s first chief operating officer and the University of South Florida’s athletic director, Kelly never lost sight of the job in Annapolis.
When Chet Gladchuk retired earlier this year after nearly a quarter-century in the position, the time was right.
“It’s personal, it’s coming home, it honors a tradition my father started and then it just happens to be serving these young men and women I admire very much,” Kelly said over lunch in his Ricketts Hall office, the picturesque Annapolis city docks just outside his ground-floor windows. “I’ve always admired them, and now that I get a chance to work with them every day, you just get inspired.”
Kelly had just returned from leading a panel discussion for donors that included Navy athletes in men’s and women’s lacrosse, baseball and women’s basketball. He marveled at their experiences, ambitions and academic endeavors.
As hard as Kelly worked as a Wake Forest undergrad and St. Thomas master’s student, it was nothing like this. Indeed, less than four months into his tenure, Kelly already understands why Borgschulte, the superintendent, refers to the USNA’s mental, moral and physical missions as “a crucible.”
“Your whole focus is to help the institution generate and prepare officers in the Navy and Marine Corps,” Kelly said. “It’s very clear: Hey, we’re going to support athletics. We love athletics, and we think that’s part of the physical mission to make great leaders and war-fighters. But it starts with Midshipmen first.”
Navy fields 36 varsity teams, tied with Ohio State and Stanford for most among the Football Bowl Subdivision’s 136 members. About one-third of Midshipmen, more than 1,400, compete at the varsity level, and hundreds more in 15 club sports, all under Kelly’s direction.
“Everybody breaks a sweat at the Naval Academy,” Kelly said with a smile.
But while Ohio State, Stanford and even USF, Kelly’s most recent stop, are consumed with unearthing the cash to pay athletes through revenue sharing and endorsement deals, Navy, Air Force and Army are immune. They don’t recruit the transfer portal, and while each service academy student receives a monthly stipend, athletes are not showered with additional financial rewards.
Kelly embraced modern college athletics at USF and led the charge for an on-campus football stadium, but he has gladly pivoted to Navy’s more traditional ways.
“It’s a big shift, isn’t it?” he said. “… It’s not that I’m running away from that. You just adjust to what your strengths are, and here our strengths are tradition and an awesome leadership institution. So instead of investing in revenue share, we’re looking at the overall betterment of the department.”
What will you become?
Navy’s tradition and leadership are on full display on the sleek, modernized second floor of Ricketts Hall. There in the Terwilliger Center for Student-Athletes are tributes to Midshipmen throughout the ages.
Former Navy quarterback Brian Broadwater, a Top Gun graduate who spent 12 years of his Naval career in Norfolk and still owns a home in Virginia Beach, is the perfect tour guide. He’s the senior associate AD for military administration operations and a walking encyclopedia of USNA history.
Four mannequins display the Midshipmen’s most-recent uniform designs for the Army-Navy football game, the sharpest of which is the 2024 edition, a white-on-white homage to the Jolly Rogers, an aviation squadron renowned for its combat success and skull-and-crossbones insignia.
Navy quarterback Blake Horvath (11) runs with the football past Army cornerback Jaydan Mayes (7) during the second half of an NCAA college football game, Saturday, Dec. 14, 2024, in Landover, Md. (AP Photo/Daniel Kucin Jr.)
Big screens flash an array of photographs of accomplished Naval Academy graduates such as President Jimmy Carter and Sen. John McCain, and in the rafters hangs a replica of an F/A-18F Super Hornet flown by the Blue Angels.
A touchscreen invites guests to scroll through dozens of biographies detailing the service of former USNA athletes. Among Broadwater’s favorites is Marine Col. Nicole Aunapu Mann (’99 soccer), who trained at Naval Air Station Oceana and as an astronaut became the first Native American woman to travel in space.
Inside a spacious, state-of-the-art theater, Kelly plays a five-minute athletic department recruiting video that poses a challenging question to prospects: What will you become?
“At the United States Naval Academy, you expect to win because you prepare to win,” a narrator says. “From the very beginning, you learn what it takes to prevail. It takes commitment, it takes discipline, it takes late nights and early mornings. Winning takes passion and perseverance. It takes your mind, your body, your heart, your everything. It takes learning from history and tradition in a place where history is made every day. …
“You learn to overcome and push yourself so far beyond your limits that you start to wonder maybe I have no limits. Maybe the team has no limits. Maybe all of us have no limits.”
Overflowing trophy cases highlight the winning. There are the Heisman Trophies won by Joe Bellino in 1960 and Roger Staubach in 1963, and 10 Presidents Cups representative of overall Patriot League sports excellence.
Football’s Commander-In-Chief’s Trophy, earned last season with victories over Army and Air Force, is normally displayed in the adjoining football offices, but Midshipmen coach Brian Newberry took the hardware to practice this week.
Navy head coach Brian Newberry walks on the field after shaking hands with Oklahoma head coach Brent Venables following the Armed Forces Bowl NCAA college football game, Friday, Dec. 27, 2024, in Fort Worth, Texas. Navy won 21-20. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
The way academy teams compete against one another “is fun to watch, whether you’re a part of one of those teams or not,” Newberry said. “You put that game on, you watch it and it makes you proud to be an American.”
‘A different purpose’
As a kid in 1975, Kelly attended his first college football game, a 17-0 Navy victory over Air Force at RFK Stadium.
Saturday, 50 years later to the day, the Midshipmen defeated the Falcons 34-31 at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium. But this time, Kelly was seated in the Navy athletic director’s box, where his guests included Tom O’Brien (USNA ’71), a former Navy and Virginia assistant coach who closed his career with head-coaching stints at Boston College and NC State.
The Midshipmen have played football since the 1890s. But for all the military heroes who competed here, for all the epic battles with academy rivals Army and Air Force, Navy has never recorded double-digit victories in consecutive seasons.
Not on the watches of College Football Hall of Fame coaches George Welsh and Paul Johnson, and not under the capable stewardship of Ken Niumatalolo.
That’s how difficult, some might say impossible, it is to sustain those heart-stirring football peaks at a service academy, when young men challenged daily in academia and committed to five years of military service rise to the sport’s highest level. The recruiting pool is too shallow, the academy life too exhausting.
“As a coach, you’re supposed to be the one that inspires your players,” Newberry said. “I tell you, I speak for our staff and myself: These guys inspire us on a daily basis.”
But though the scheduling gods conspire against, Newberry’s current squad has an opportunity to rewrite that history and produce another 10-win season.
The Midshipmen last year finished 10-3 and upset top-25 foes Army and Memphis, the first time since 1958 that they had defeated two ranked opponents. And with the likes of quarterback Blake Horvath, nose guard Landon Robinson and running backs Alex Tecza and Eli Heidenreich returning, 2025 expectations soared.
Sure enough, Navy is 5-0 for the second straight year, the first time that’s happened since 1978 and ’79 under Welsh. The back half of the schedule includes Notre Dame, fellow American Conference contenders North Texas, USF and Memphis, plus the traditional regular-season finale against Army, but second-year coordinator Drew Cronic’s modernized, “millennial wing-T” offense figures to test all comers.
“We call him an evil scientist sometimes,” Heidenreich said of Cronic.
“We believe that the only team that can stop us is ourselves,” Horvath said.
Air Force certainly couldn’t.
Horvath’s 469 yards in total offense set a program record, and with 339 yards passing and 130 rushing, he became Navy’s first 300-100 quarterback since Broadwater in 2000. Meanwhile, Heidenreich established one school record (243 receiving yards) and tied another (three touchdown catches of 19, 80 and 60 yards).
Moreover, the Midshipmen have accumulated 450-plus yards in five consecutive games for the first time ever, and with a 3-0 league record, they sit atop the American.
Navy and Army house their football programs in the American, a disparate collection of 14 schools in 10 far-flung states — New York, Florida, Texas and Oklahoma among them — that’s arguably college football’s best conference outside the Power Four.
But their other sports compete in the Patriot League, a tidy, geographically sensible group of elite academic institutions. The Midshipmen excel in both conferences.
“No matter what’s happening in college sports,” Kelly said, “we still want to play at whatever level is the best (for us). But we still know intrinsically that we’re here for a different purpose.”
David Teel, david.teel@virginiamedia.com
