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Category: personal growth

Underway

Published August 31, 2026

50 Stories for 50 Years — Post 29 After plebe summer, after a full academic year of being told exactly where to be and exactly what to do, and after climbing Herndon, the Navy hands you a ship and says, “Run it.” Not entirely. Not alone. But it felt close enough. A tension is worth naming before this story starts. Throughout the academic year, we trained alongside our male classmates: same classes, same formations, same…

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Herndon

Published August 17, 2026

50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 28 I was chopping down the middle of the hallway. Chopping is the naval term for running, square corners, eyes forward. All plebes chopped whenever we were out of our rooms. It was one more thing that marked us as plebes, and there was only one way plebe year ended. Climb Herndon. Herndon is a 21-foot granite obelisk on the grounds of the Naval Academy. Like every monument…

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OOD Trifecta

Published August 3, 2026

50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 26 The Officer of the Deck (OOD) is the one responsible for keeping order in Bancroft Hall on any given night. He patrols the passageways, checks on the midshipmen, and makes sure everyone’s where they’re supposed to be. Plebe year, winter, my roommate and I found out just how thorough one particular OOD could be. It was a regular Saturday night in the Hall. As plebes, we had…

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The Quarter-Pounder Incident

Published July 6, 2026

An 18-year-old man requires roughly 600-1,000 more calories per day than an 18-year-old woman of the same activity level. The Naval Academy had not yet done this math in the mid-1970s. USNA served the Brigade, some 4,400 midshipmen, family style, averaging 3,500 to 4,200 calories a day. It was built for men who sustained heavy academic, military, and physical loads. The nutrition science of the era wasn’t what it is now, and sports teams got…

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Just keep swimming

Published June 29, 2026

50 Stories for 50 Years | Post 21 Swimming existed at the Naval Academy long before women did. That mattered. When I arrived in the summer of 1977, I already knew the water. Age-group swimming since I was eleven. Two-a-day practices in high school. The rhythm of yards and turns, and the particular silence of being underwater while the world above stayed loud. Of all the spaces at the Naval Academy, the pools were the…

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Wedgie War

Published June 8, 2026

50 Stories for 50 Years of Women at USNA — Post 19 There is a particular feeling that comes before impending chaos in Bancroft Hall. Not a sound, exactly. More like a change in frequency. A rumble, then something electric in the air. If Bancroft were a forest, you would see it in the animals first – the way they stop, ears up, and begin fleeing before the fire is seen. Before the smoke. Like…

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