Owls experience the Naval Academy

ANNAPOLIS, Md. - Temple point guard Josh Brown was steering a $1 billion, 509-foot destroyer through the choppy waters of the St. Johns River at Naval Station Mayport near Jacksonville, Fla. Teammate Mark Williams, standing up front, was his navigator. Before the Owls got on the "ship," they had been told North Carolina's team "wrecked" it earlier.

It began to rain hard, followed by thunder. The ship began to sway as the currents picked up dramatically.

"Talk to me," Brown implored Williams.

"Go point-5 to the right," Williams said, apparently well-versed in maritime lingo.

"Copy that," Brown answered.

The point guard was trying to steer the massive ship out of the channel to the Atlantic Ocean. He had smoothly avoided other vessels and obstacles along the way. Just as he was nearing safe waters, a voice said: "It's time to go to lunch."

It was, in fact, nearing the end of a fascinating Thursday morning at the United States Naval Academy for the basketball teams from Temple, North Carolina and Florida, all participating in Friday night's Veterans Classic at Alumni Hall on the Navy campus.

The Temple players stepped out of the ship simulator in Luce Hall. They were off to the front of Bancroft Hall to see "Noon Meal Formation," in which the entire 4,400-member brigade of midshipmen assembles every school day before heading to lunch in what has to be the world's largest "restaurant," a three-wing space that the term "cavernous" does not come close to describing.

Navy coach Ed DeChellis came up with the idea of the Veterans Classic. He called upon some of his good friends in the business to participate. When Michigan State's Tom Izzo said yes, the event was on. Last year, on the first night of the college basketball season, it was VCU-Tennessee, followed by Michigan State-Navy.

This year, DeChellis asked his friends Roy Williams, Fran Dunphy and Billy Donovan to participate. So, Friday night, it is No. 1 UNC against Temple, followed by Florida-Navy. Donovan, now in the NBA with the Oklahoma City Thunder, has been replaced at Florida by Mike White, but the spirit of the event lives on.

The basketball games are a nice endpoint, but the two days at Navy are about far more than hoops.

Thursday morning's first event began on the front steps of Bancroft, aka Mother B, almost certainly the world's largest dormitory, where every one of those 4,400 students live. There is no off-campus housing. There is only Bancroft Hall, with its 3 1/2 miles of hall and eight wings that house 30 companies with 120 mids in each.

It is explained that at 8 a.m. every day around the world on ships, ports at sea and the Naval Academy, hard by the Chesapeake Bay in historic Annapolis, the capital of Maryland, the colors go up and stay there until sunset. The simple, yet elegant ceremony was performed this Thursday morning in front of the coaches, captains and a few other people from each of the other three teams. The Navy basketball players were not excused from class, not even for this.

Stephen Liszewski, a 1990 USNA graduate and the Commandant of Midshipmen, essentially the dean of students, hosted a reception in a large space outside his office where Owls captain Jaylen Bond and UNC coach Williams could share a sofa and a few words and Dunphy could remember a trip one of his Penn teams took to Navy on a snowy afternoon when Hassan Duncombe downed a "pizza-and-a-half" at an I-95 rest stop and then went for 44 and 15 that night at old Halsey Field House.

Before the group headed over to Ricketts Hall - which many of the Navy athletic teams, including football and basketball, call home - some went into a model dorm room with its perfectly made bunk beds and lockers, with nothing out of place.

"David Robinson slept on those beds?" somebody wanted to know. He did, with his legs either curled up or dangling off the end.

All the players from all the teams gathered in a football team room with a large sign that reads "tradition never graduates." They watched a short film about the academy, "The Call to Serve," and then heard that in a typical year, 25,000 apply to the Naval Academy for only 1,200 slots. The admission process has been so streamlined that only 8 percent of those who begin fail to graduate from one of the most strenuous - mentally and physically - academic institutions on earth to become Navy ensigns or Marine second lieutenants.

Three Marines, including Capt. Drexel King, a former Navy football player, marched into the room after the film and challenged the teams.

"What are you doing with the platform you've been given?" King asked. "Trophies fade away. What did you do with your talents?"

Leadership, it was explained, is also a "contact sport, be a leader."

The teams each went off on their own to experience the academy, to be midshipmen for a few hours. The doors to an MH-60 S helicopter, modeled after the Army's Black Hawk, were flung open so Temple's players, way too big for the space, immediately crammed inside, putting on the gear, taking selfies, perhaps imagining they were up in the air.

"Where are the missiles?" freshman Levan Alston wanted to know, helmet on head, visor down over his face. "I want to fire one off."

The helicopter, which had been flown up earlier in the morning from Norfolk, Va., was definitely not designed for basketball players.

"Kinda tight in there," Bond said. "I can't imagine how they do it all day."

Cmdr. John Schofield, a 1996 Villanova graduate, in Navy's public affairs office and one of Temple's hosts, pointed the way to a nearby Humvee and suggested that somebody "climb in the turret" with a rather large weapon.

Quenton DeCosey went for it and his teammates immediately implored him to "Shoot it, Q."

"It's the most animated I've seen Quenton DeCosey," Dunphy said.

Some of the players then scrambled into the back of a 7-ton truck that can transport troops and cargo with all-terrain capability best exemplified by tires the size of the Comcast Tower. The truck fits 16. Be a nice vehicle for your team as it headed into a gym on the road. Definitely be intimidating to see players flying out the back.

"This is how we're going to the Palestra this year," Dunphy said.

As the team was about to board a 119-foot Yard Patrol Craft (YP), with the late-morning wind whipping off the bay, Alston said, "I want to stay on land."

He boarded anyway along with the rest of team, which had to navigate a space that felt claustrophobic for normal-sized individuals. Imagine, it was suggested to the players, being aboard for four weeks in the summer like many of the midshipmen. None of the players volunteered for duty.

The tour time was growing short as Schofield and fellow host Lt. Cmdr. Ben Stein, a 2005 USNA graduate, former F-18 pilot and now speechwriter for the academy superintendent, pointed the way to that simulator across campus inside a hall whose entrance is guarded by a statue of Vice Adm. James Bond Stockdale, the only three-star admiral who won aviator wings and the Medal of Honor and also happened to be a POW in Vietnam.

Just before the noon formation, the Temple players got a moment inside Memorial Hall, a space inside Bancroft that looks very much like a high-class museum.

The "Don't Give Up the Ship" flag was hard to miss. So were all the names from all the wars through all the years.

"This is our living memorial to every United States Naval Academy graduate who lost their lives," Schofield said.

A light rain began to fall as 4,400 men and women somehow seamlessly formed up without a word or sound, paused for a brief ceremony, then marched perfectly up stairs into Bancroft and down some stairs into King Hall, the only dining hall at the academy.

"It's a helluva way to go to lunch," DeChellis said.

There is one tiny table just inside the entrance, with one setting, placed there by the King staff in 2004 in memory of all the POWs and MIAs.

Lunch is choreographed to the minute, because there are no minutes to waste in a Navy day that begins with 5:30 a.m. reveille and ends when every assignment is done. Nobody lingers over coffee or dessert. On this special Thursday, the players shared tables with the midshipmen and perhaps heard a bit about their lives.

An incredible 40 percent of the Navy students play one of 33 varsity sports. Only Ohio State and Stanford have more than 33. And if you are not on a team, you are never inactive. You are playing something.

"Everybody here breaks a sweat," is a motto.

Dunphy, an old Army man, understood the day and the place perfectly.

"I want the players to understand how privileged they are to be part of this," he said. "They really got a fuller appreciation of what life is."

The basketball season begins Friday night. The season at the Naval Academy began in 1845, and there is no end in sight.