Service Academies Face Challenges To Win

The term “brotherhood” can be applied to just about any college baseball team. The shared experiences of school and play, the triumphs and heartbreaks of a long season have a way of forging that kind of bond. Walk into the locker rooms at Air Force, Army or Navy, however, and it’s a little different.

“We definitely have a stronger bond than any other team,” Air Force junior outfielder Tyler Jones said. “We’ve all been through basic training. We’ve all been through survival training. We all go to school together. We all take 20 hours together. Really, sometimes baseball is your release from all the pressures of the academy.”

At Navy, Midshipmen ace lefthander Luke Gillingham begins every day at 6:20 a.m., with a uniform inspection at 6:55 followed by a full day of classes, possibly sneaking in a bullpen session at lunch. The team’s official practice comes at the end of the day, after which it’s back for more studying.

“We’ve got a pretty rigid schedule, and athletics are a priority here but not as much as at other schools,” Gillingham said. “We’ll hustle from one thing to another—get practice in during the day when we can, but we’ve really got to take advantage of the time we have when we’re out at the field.”

The demands on the players’ time are all part of what Navy head coach Paul Kostacopoulos calls, “the yin and the yang” of coaching at an academy. The academic standards are high, practice time is precious and, of course, you have to find the players willing to commit to military service after graduation, putting off possible pro careers in the process.

On the flip side, when you do find those players, characteristics like high work ethic and motivation come part and parcel.

“They understand what it means to take ownership in a situation, in a program,” Army head coach Matt Reid said. “Take accountability and hold others accountable—hold themselves accountable—and have great self-discipline to show up every day.”

“The reasons we play sports at all the academies are very simple,” Air Force coach Mike Kazlausky said. “It’s about winning. It’s about losing. It’s about developing character—adversity, stress, pressure, teamwork. Because that’s what’s going to be required of them later down the road.”

Joining Up

Whatever obstacles there might be, Kazlausky is adamant that recruiting to an academy should not be hard. You get to offer a full-ride scholarship to play baseball at an elite academic school, with a guaranteed job after graduation. A 1991 USAFA graduate who served 20 years, Kazlausky knows of what he speaks, and as he himself puts it, “It’s easy to recruit here.”

“When you look across the country at the thousands of kids that play high school baseball, we’re going to bring in a select few each year,” Kazlausky said. “If I can’t find that select few that are willing to pass on other opportunities to come serve, I need to lose my job. Because it’s easy.”

The academies do have to cast a wide net. Their rosters are peppered with players from all corners of the country. How the academies’ coaches go about recruiting isn’t particularly different than what other schools do—it’s still about getting out there and seeing players—with one caveat. If a player isn’t at least somewhat predisposed to the idea of a military career, it becomes a tough sell.

“I’ve found over the 10, 11 years I’ve been here that there has to at least be an interest from the individual in order to continue the recruiting process,” Kostacopoulos said. “They have to have some. It’s really hard for us to—I’m not saying it doesn’t happen—make people interested in going to a service academy.”

Gillingham was one of those that already had the interest, having grown up with a father in the Navy. The senior, who went to Coronado (Calif.) High, said he did get some interest from other schools early on in the recruiting process, but once Navy got involved, “I kinda took this and ran.”

“Kids want to play,” Kostacopoulos said. “So, I think that’s a big priority with them, but it’s also a big priority that they want to serve our country. That’s a pretty unique kind of guy.”

On the field, Army and Navy have been the more successful of the three. Army’s posted a cumulative .570 winning percentage since 2000 with five NCAA tournament appearances, while Navy has a .504 winning percentage in that span and two regional trips. The Midshipmen also won the Patriot League’s regular season title a year ago behind Gillingham (8-1, 1.19), a semifinalist for the Golden Spikes Award, although Navy lost to Lehigh in the finals of the conference tournament.

Air Force, which hasn’t had a winning season since 1995, under coach Eric Campbell (now with USA Baseball), is a different story. The program was nearly dropped amid budgetary issues three years ago, and the Falcons went through 11 straight years of fewer than 20 wins —their last regional trip was in 1969. However, they’ve upped their win total each of the last four years under Kazlausky, with last year’s 23-win campaign their best since 2002, and had two players drafted in the last three seasons, just the third and fourth in program history.

“When I got here for my freshman year, I think we had 25 guys on our roster, maybe only 11 or 12 of those who could really compete,” Jones said. “I remember we went to Arizona and we played two games there and we just had no business being in the game with those guys. But we’ve developed and we’ve grown. Looking at our schedule now, there’s not anybody that we play that I wouldn’t be confident that we could beat.”

No Time To Rest

Another fact of life when it comes to service academy baseball is that opportunities to play during the summer are limited. Players get a few weeks off—Jones did get to play 16 games in the Northwoods League last summer—but most of the summer is taken up by military training or trips abroad. Gillingham, for instance, spent part of one summer aboard a Navy cruiser and part of another learning to fly—he’s eyeing aviation as his career path once he enters service.

So when it comes to player development, there’s a premium on fall ball as the academy teams look to catch up on all the innings and at-bats their competition get over the summer.

“In terms of the fall, it’s always been a thing since I’ve been here where fall ball is taken very seriously,” Gillingham said. “Everybody’s playing. Other schools, they let their guys throw in the summer and then they’ll have the fall off. For us, fall ball, we hit it hard.”

Missing summer ball also means missing key opportunities to play in front of scouts. Nevertheless, avenues to a pro career are there. All three academies had players drafted last year, the highest being Navy righthander Stephen Moore, a 10th-round pick of the Braves. This, coming in the same year the Cardinals’ Mitch Harris became just the second-ever Academy graduate to reach the majors.

Harris was obligated to serve five years’ active duty after graduating from Navy in 2008, but the Department of Defense has since started allowing prospective pro athletes to petition to be released from active duty after two years, after which they’d remain in the reserves for eight if the request is granted.

“A lot of the guys we recruit want to have a chance to play at the next level,” Reid said. “So, the fact that they see (Harris) out there doing it gives them that inspiration that they can do it too, if they put through the work . . . It’s a different route, but they can still do it and it’s still there for them. I think that’s a really great thing to have.”

And while there will be far more important tests ahead for the Black Knights, Falcons and Midshipmen than winning or losing a weekend series, perhaps Jones puts it best: “The guys that are here, we do come to play baseball and we take pride in that. We want to compete at the highest level, and we’re going to.”