First-year expansion franchises rarely make headlines for anything outside of record-setting futility. The Las Vegas Golden Knights are the exception to beat all exceptions, but while the team has been the story of the NHL season, it’s been on the radar of Army officials for a bit longer. In late 2016, reports surfaced that team owner Bill Foley, a 1967 U.S. Military Academy graduate, had his heart set on “Black Knights” as the team nickname, echoing both his alma mater and a number of his other business interests. Foley told Army Times that the academy pushed back on the plan,…
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Duke head coach and U.S. Military Academy graduate Mike Krzyzewski makes no secret that his time as a cadet and as a 20-something head coach of the Army basketball team molded him into a college basketball icon who has amassed more than 1,000 career wins. He even brought Team USA to West Point last year in the hopes that some of the academy’s lore would rub off. But the early days of Coach K regularly take a back seat to his impressive accomplishments a few hundred miles south, where his Blue Devils will again enter the NCAA tournament later this week with…
After the Naval Academy rescheduled a soccer game this week and the Air Force Academy announced it wouldn’t travel to Annapolis for this weekend’s big Navy-Air Force football game, it looked like the government shutdown had completely cast its shadow over service academy athletics. However, the Naval Academy announced late Wednesday that the game against Air Force and would go on. At the time, it was the only athletic contest that remained on Navy’s shutdown-shortened schedule, but the school announced Friday that some games were back on the docket. Even the women’s soccer game at American University, which had been…
If Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke Blue Devils beat Michigan State tonight (ESPN, 7 p.m. EST), he’ll get his 903rd win and become college basketball’s all-time winningest coach. In doing that, he’ll pass his mentor — and his former Army head coach — Bob Knight. Krzyzewski was coached by Knight for all of his four seasons at West Point. Knight forced him to change his playing style, and Krzyzewski went from being a top scorer in high school to primarily a staunch defender and ball-handler for the Army team. He struggled to find his place — even getting booted off the team…
Nick Hill may never make the major leagues, but he’s already getting a fair amount of media exposure. A 2007 West Point graduate pitching in the Seattle Mariners farm system, he has been interviewed frequently during the last two years, as his future with the baseball and military became clear. Hill, of course, is one of several officer-athletes who were caught in the middle when the Army decided in July 2008 to drop its Alternative Service Options program, a plan launched in 2005 to allow West Point and ROTC graduates with professional sports contracts to play immediately after graduation. The policy said…
