Randy McKamey still keeps a recording of the phone call. On it, his son Will, then a plebe at the United States Naval Academy, is discussing his new coach, Ken Niumatalolo. “The first words out of his mouth were, ‘Dad, he gets it,’” McKamey recalls. “He said, ‘He doesn’t just know my name, he knows everybody’s name. He’s the real deal.’ At that moment, I was so relieved that he had a father figure coaching him. A guy that cared.” Just how invested Niumatalolo was is something McKamey would tragically learn firsthand months later when Will, the oldest of his four children—“the heavenly one,” as his wife, Kara, now calls him—lay dying in a hospital room.

On March 22, 2014, their short, slight, but iron-willed son collapsed from an unusual brain hemorrhage—not linked to a bad hit or severe contact—during a practice in Annapolis. A day later, Niumatalolo, a devout Mormon, joined Randy and Kara by 19-year-old Will’s bedside at R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, where they prayed.

“We had a little bit of a ceremonial event with just me, Kara, and Kenny,” says Randy McKamey, a high school football coach in Tennessee. “It [reinforced] to me that Will had been in the right place the entire time, with a God-fearing man. Things don’t begin and end with football; there’s more to life than that.”

This, Ken Niumatalolo has always known.

Lots of coaches throw around terms like “family” and “student-athlete” as casually as they drop f-bombs, but few have established a track record of backing them up like Niumatalolo. With a record of 77-42, he is Navy’s all-time winningest coach. Scan the list of finalists for The Dodd Trophy, given to the national college coach of the year, for the past two seasons and you’ll find his name is the only one to appear twice. All of which makes his perspective on his famously life-consuming profession that much more intriguing.  

“I’m very grateful to be the head football coach here, but this job isn’t everything to me,” he says. “It doesn’t define who I am.”

First and foremost, Niumatalolo says, his life is built around his relationships with his wife, his three children, and his faith. But his legacy also can be found in the character of his players, who, after finishing their collegiate careers, graduate not to fame and fortune in the NFL, but to military service around the world.

“What Coach Ken does is hard,” says J.D. Gainey, commanding officer of USS Hopper, a guided-missile destroyer. Niumatalolo was an assistant coach at Navy when Gainey played offensive line in the mid-1990s. “Coaching 18- to 22-year-olds whose performance directly impacts your life and family, getting them to choose right in the face of adversity, hardship, and fatigue, is hard to do. Motivating these kids to bring it as hard as they can daily, as well as asking for unconditional trust in all decisions made for the program, is really tough. I didn’t realize it until I was in the same situation with 300 sailors and a 9,000-ton destroyer under my care.”

It has been an unlikely journey for a man born in American Samoa and raised in Laie, on the northeastern shore of Oahu, Hawaii’s third-largest island, where the waves break high and the stress stays low. Niumatalolo never aspired to lead a big-time college football program. But fate—or a higher power—had other plans for him.

From his earliest days as a not-quite-good-enough quarterback at the University of Hawai’i, Niumatalolo has been an analytical kind of guy. Basketball was his first love, but he was a bit too short and a step too slow for the sport. As a backup QB in college, he grew frustrated with his lack of playing time.

“I decided that instead of coming to meetings with a bad attitude, I might as well learn something,” he says.

So he dedicated himself to understanding the intricacies of the game, and the offensive coordinator at UH, Paul Johnson, took note. After Niumatalolo earned his degree in communications, Johnson offered him a low-paying position as a graduate assistant. Already married to his college sweetheart Barbara, Niumatalolo took it, and vowed to get a “real job” in two years if it didn’t work out. He has been coaching ever since.

“He was always a smart guy, and he grasped the concepts of the offense,” says Johnson, who brought Niumatalolo with him to Annapolis when he became Navy’s offensive coordinator. “When you’re looking for coaches, you want good people. He’s got a self-confidence, he is a man of strong faith, and I think that leads him in most of everything he does.”

When Johnson left Navy in 1997, Niumatalolo was elevated to offensive coordinator under Charlie Weatherbie. It was not a smooth transition.

“Charlie and I didn’t see eye-to-eye,” he says. Then, with a typically blunt assessment he adds, “I got fired from here because I opened my mouth too much. I needed to learn to shut my mouth.”

Where else could Niumatalolo have an impact on the lives of young men—not just their football careers—like he can at Navy?

Niumatalolo landed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he saw how the rest of the college football world lived.

“Maybe the guys are a little bigger and faster, but there are different character kids,” he says. “Not to say that all the kids at UNLV are bad, that would be wrong, because there are a lot of good kids there. But here, just the military part—shining your shoes, shaving every day [is a significant difference]. You’re not taking Mickey Mouse courses so you can stay eligible. You’re taking what everybody else is taking, and the workload is grueling. If you’ve got a paper due on Thursday and we’re playing Notre Dame, guess what, you’ve got to turn in your paper. It’s not like that everywhere.”

Johnson came back to Annapolis as head coach in 2002, and he hired Niumatalolo to direct the offensive line. Six years later, Johnson wanted to see how his vaunted triple option offense (which Niumatalolo still employs) would work at a larger program with more resources and less anchors—so to speak—than Navy, so he departed for Georgia Tech. Niumatalolo was named head coach.

Now, almost a decade later, the question arises: Is moving to a football program in a bigger conference an interest that dogs Niumatalolo?

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it,” he says. “That’s why I tell parents and recruits that if there’s a job opportunity that I feel is better for my family, I feel I owe it to my family to listen. Last year, I talked to Cal. I’m from Hawaii, so I thought I’d be interested in the West Coast, but it wasn’t the right fit for either one of us, so it didn’t work out. It’s going to take something really special for me to leave here because this is a special place.”

Navy fans feared that opportunity presented itself after the 2015 season, when Niumatalolo was courted by Brigham Young University. Coaching at the Mormon school would be not just a job, but a calling.

“I was very interested,” he says. “It came down to some technicalities. It wasn’t formally offered because there were some things I wasn’t willing to budge on. I’ve got a great job. I love it here. I’m not looking to just jump to jump. The grass isn’t always greener.”

Where else could Niumatalolo have an impact on the lives of young men—not just their football careers—like he can at Navy? Consider not just the comfort he provided to the McKameys in the wake of their son’s unimaginable death, but the impact he has had on people like his former player and newest assistant coach, Bryce McDonald.

“I actually took some of the stuff he did as a coach and employed it in the way I taught marine tactics,” says McDonald, who retired from the Marines Corps in 2012 as a captain. “He always used to do walk-throughs, and he wouldn’t go onto the next coaching point until everyone understood. Some teachers will just talk and talk and hope you absorb something. The way he taught was a two-way dialogue. He made people think. I used that to teach ambush and patrol tactics. You’d be in a classroom environment but no one’s sitting down, they’re actually standing in formation and giving feedback.”

During spring practice, Niumatalolo’s days begin in the same place where so many of ours do: the bathroom. When he gets to work around 5 a.m., his first stop is the private one inside his office suite on the third floor of Ricketts Hall. There, he kneels on the floor, prays, and reads scripture.

As part of his faith, he doesn’t come in on Sundays, and his staff stays home as well—a rarity in college football. (That said, between his church obligations, family time, and an occasional nap, he generally finds time to watch film of his team on weekends during the season. He’s usually at the office by 3:30 a.m. on Mondays.) He has never had as much as a sip of alcohol, and although he can’t say he has never cursed—“I’m human”—when he’s angry the worst thing you’ll hear coming out of his mouth is a torrent of “dadgummits.”

“I just don’t believe that you need to ‘MF’ a kid to motivate him,” he says. “You can be firm and demanding and get after him, but I don’t think you need to belittle people. I have two sons that are playing college football, and a lot of our coaches have sons. I tell my guys, ‘Would you want your son being talked to like that by another coach?’”

But don’t let the outwardly laid-back Pacific-island vibe he exudes fool you—Niumatalolo is an intense competitor. Ask anyone who has played pick-up basketball or tennis with him. At a meeting in April, he sits at the head of a conference table watching video of the previous day’s practice surrounded by his coaching staff. His voice is calm, even understated, but his authority unquestionable.  

“Jiminy Christmas,” he grumbles when a quarterback throws an errant pass.

“Holy smokes, look at his hips,” he says of an offensive lineman. “He’s probably the worst tackle we have. I’d be petrified if I was a quarterback and he was protecting me.”

Coaches tend to see the football as half-deflated when they watch their own teams, and especially during spring ball, warts are plainly visible on film. But the criticism being bandied about is offered in pursuit of one objective: making each individual on his team better.

And not just as players.

“In a meeting we’ll go from talking about ‘John Smith’s’ play on the field to his grade in physics to where he’s at with his [Naval Academy] swim qualification,” says McDonald. “He sees the whole picture. He knows a parent has entrusted him with their son, so he is responsible for them.”

This has been a particularly intense off-season for Niumatalolo, in part because of the way last year ended. Navy dropped its final three games, and he’s working to understand why. The team was ravaged by injuries, so he’s focused on details as minute as practice surfaces, equipment, and shoes. At the meeting, he stresses to his position coaches to push hydration. Answers have been elusive thus far, but he won’t stop searching for them.

At a practice later that afternoon, Niumatalolo strolls around one of Navy’s fields as his team runs through meticulously calibrated drills. Wearing a Navy visor, a whistle hanging where his signature lei does during Army-Navy games, he’s greeting visiting coaches with hugs and a wide grin. In nearby Spa Creek, sailboats harness the perfect breeze; there’s not a cloud in the deep blue sky, and the grass under Niumatalolo’s feet is a rich shade of green.

Right now, there’s no place he’d rather be.

London calling.
It’s only a seven-hour direct flight.

The NFL formally announced this week that the Ravens will be one of eight NFL teams to play a game in London next year. Overseas games are big business for the league, which has staged 17 games in the United Kingdom since 2007, most in front at least 83,000 fans at Wembley Stadium, where soccer is typically played.

Joe Flacco and friends will be there either Sept. 24 or Oct. 1, 2017 against the Jacksonville Jaguars. Whatever happens, hopefully no one makes like Paul Rudd in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and leaves a bad impression across the pond.

As for this year, after losing to the Patriots on Monday night and releasing veteran returner Devin Hester, the Ravens can still make the playoffs. They just need to win their last three regular-season games (vs. Philadelphia on Sunday, at Pittsburgh on Christmas Day and at Cincinnati on New Year’s Day), or even lose one and get some help from other teams losing. That would avoid a dubious first: missing the playoffs in two straight years for the first time in coach John Harbaugh’s nine seasons.

Get your tea and crumpets ready, #RavensFlock.

Next season, we will play a road game vs. Jacksonville at London’s Wembley Stadium. pic.twitter.com/SqYDeaWk7L
— Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) December 13, 2016

Pugh, Trump meet at Army-Navy game.
Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh met face-to-(hair?) with President-elect Donald Trump in the bowels of M&T Bank Stadium last Saturday at the 117th Army-Navy football game.

Pugh shared details of the brief exchange with reporters on Wednesday at City Hall. She greeted Trump as he got out of his car and she hand-delivered a letter that details what she hopes are common interests: improving parts of the city’s infrastructure.

Pugh offered Baltimore as “the perfect place to target” federal money for the type of upgrades Trump has touted he will make happen during his presidency. The meat of the letter focused on transportation around a redeveloped Port Covington and a proposed expansion of the Howard Street rail tunnel, upgrading aging water and sewer systems—please, not another sinkhole!—and strengthening citywide internet capabilities.

In typical lightning-rod fashion, when he arrived inside the home of the Ravens during the first quarter, Trump drew some cheers while protesters outside voiced their opinions and officials boosted security for the visit. On air with CBS television during the game, which Army won 21-17 to snap Navy’s 14-game win streak in the series, Trump said of the play on the field: “I don’t know if it’s necessarily the best football—but it’s very good—but, boy, do they have spirit.”

So there’s that. But at least sports brought a Democrat and a Republican together for a few minutes, and gave the city an audience.

With @realDonaldTrump in Baltimore I delivered a letter noting importance of our infrastructure needs & need for investment of federal funds pic.twitter.com/61OsajKvtQ
— Catherine Pugh (@MayorPugh50) December 10, 2016

O’s, kids have fun at holiday party.
The Oriole Bird slipped into his Santa suit and hat—where does he get these things?—and joined Orioles players Chris Davis, Darren O’Day, Caleb Joseph and Tyler Wilson, and 80 outpatients from the University of Maryland Children’s Hospital, at the team’s 38th annual charity holiday party on Tuesday.

The kids and adults (well, baseball players are really kids, too) hit the arcade games and shared lunch at Dave & Buster’s at Arundel Mills Mall. Chicken nuggets, pizza and fries were on the menu. Davis even poured a few drinks at the bar: punch and lemonade. And he later joked about how fun it was to get “dominated in games by kids that are half your age.”

Davis and his wife, Jill, a former nurse who worked in a children’s hospital in Texas, have partnered this year with UMCH and they will serve as an ambassadors for the hospital. The Davis’ plan to raise awareness of the hospital’s programs (last year it cared for 40,000 children) and childhood illnesses, in addition to donations that Baltimore’s $161 million dollar man and spouse have already made to the hospital’s NICU unit.

A holiday cheers to that. Now, Santa Bird, we love you and your outfit, but how about that starting pitcher or two we’ve been waiting on the last few years?

Kevin Plank seals MLB uniform deal at winter meetings.
Though it was confirmed in October that Under Armour will take over for Majestic Athletic as the official on-field uniform provider for Major League Baseball in 2020, the 10-year deal was inked on Monday at winter meetings. In the agreement, Under Armour will supply all 30 MLB clubs with uniforms for 10 years and its partner, Fanatics, will have licensing rights to manufacture and distribute gear.

According to The Baltimore Sun, Plank called the deal “a massive statement for our company. This deal for us is one where we really get to lock arms, dig our heels in and say we’re going to fight for this sport.”

MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is hoping that the UA deal will strike a chord with younger sports fans, getting them engaged in the game of baseball.

“When we started talking about this deal with the owners, one of the single biggest themes that came back from them was they wanted the game associated with a young brand,” Manfred said. “To grow the game with young people, you have to have athletes and products young people want to wear, and we think Under Armour is uniquely situated to provide those products.”

One major difference that the Baltimore-based athletic apparel company has already announced is that its logo will appear on the front of the uniforms, as opposed to the sleeves where Majestic was positioned. Some fans aren’t so happy about this move and one website, Uni Watch, did some quick PhotoShop work to envision what the future uniforms might look like.

Army vs. Navy game this weekend will host a special guest.
In a tradition dating back to 1901, President-elect Donald Trump is scheduled to attend the 117th Army-Navy football game at M&T Bank Stadium on Saturday. “In keeping with a time-honored tradition, he will spend half of the game on the Army side and then half on the Navy side, who will win their 15th straight game, I’m sure,” Sean Spicer, communications director for the Republican National Committee (and a member of the Navy Reserves since 1999), told The Washington Post.

Though presidents from Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman to John F. Kennedy up through Barack Obama have watched the two military rivals face off, this is the first time in which a President-elect has attended the game.

We’re wondering if President-elect Trump has heard the news that the Baltimore City Council voted unanimously to condemn statements made by him in the council’s first official act. The resolution formally opposed Trump’s “divisive and scapegoating rhetoric, rooted in hate and prejudice.”

Can we say awkward?

It’s part of the Annapolis civic rhythm: More than a thousand teenagers from every corner of the country descending on the burg for a bittersweet annual affair known as Induction Day. This arrival of the newest class at the U. S. Naval Academy is a whirlwind, as kids have their locks shorn and trade colorful T-shirts and baseball caps for clean “white works” sailor uniforms and “Dixie cup” hats. Bands play, oaths are taken, and erstwhile civilian high schoolers turn into entry-level midshipmen called plebes.

Parents are on hand for most of the spectacle, swelling with pride. And rightly so, given that the Naval Academy’s acceptance rate is just north of 7 percent. But there’s apprehension in the air, too. Worry over what lies ahead. In the short term, the concern is Plebe Summer—the seven-week, boot-camp-esque baptism-of-fire into the world of naval discipline and a plebe’s bottom-rung place in the hierarchy. Sir, yes, sir! Ma’am, yes, ma’am!

Sharon Disher knows this all too well, and not just as an Annapolitan who’s gotten caught in the annual traffic jam of out-of-state plates. Forty years ago, her parents delivered her to “the Yard” (as the academy’s campus is called) as part of the Class of 1980—the first class to include women since the school’s founding in 1845.

On a broiling hot July day back in that bicentennial summer, her arm stinging from inoculations and her eyes welling with tears, Disher threw her Air Force-officer father her first salute. She hugged and kissed the whole clan who’d come out to see her off and joined a swelling stream of white works marching down to dinner at Bancroft Hall, the world’s largest dormitory, which dominates the Yard like a run-aground, beaux-arts battleship. Its looming metal door shut behind her.

“I was like, hang it up? Oh really? Just watch me,” recalls Sharon Disher.

For Disher, it was her first Navy chow—and her first taste of what life would be like over the next four years. “When I asked to be excused from the table, I did it the wrong way,” she says. “An upperclassman stood up, put his knuckles on the table and stared at me, saying, ‘I don’t like women at my school. I don’t want women at my school. It will be my mission to make sure you’re gone before I graduate. Is that clear?’

“I’m like, oh my gosh, welcome aboard.”

Ultimately, Disher persevered and became one of the first 55 women to graduate from the Naval Academy. And the country has since watched as many of the women from those early coed classes launched brilliant naval careers—becoming admirals, astronauts, and aircraft-carrier fighter pilots. Today, the “armored ceiling” appears broken. But it’s still too soon to say all is right between the sexes. Accusations of disturbing episodes at the academy have filled headlines these last few years. Sexual harassment and assault plague the military schools as they do civilian universities. Nonetheless, that plucky band of brave women who made history four decades ago certainly helped steer the ship in the right direction.

On this, the 40th anniversary of women being accepted into the U.S. Naval Academy, the incoming class includes the largest number of female plebes ever enrolled. The 2020 class starts this fall with 331 women, including 19 daughters of academy alumni.

But, no, it wasn’t going to be smooth sailing for the ladies who had burst into this 131-year-old boys’ club. “Everything we did was wrong because we were girls,” Disher says of the days—the years—that followed her initial Navy meal. “Everything. We were fat. We were ugly. We didn’t belong there.”

Not every male classmate shared this view, but thanks to the power of peer pressure, such gender animosity was the norm. “The females had an incredibly tough time—much harder than I did,” says Severna Park resident Tim Kobosko, also a member of the Class of 1980. “I don’t think they got treated fairly. There was a lot of groupthink going on and it was unfortunate.”

Even the ladies’ room wasn’t safe. When the academic year began after Plebe Summer, Disher was assigned a new dorm room with a new women’s lavatory. A surprise, however, awaited the first time nature called and she closed the stall door behind her. “Somebody had taken a pencil and written on the back of the door: ‘Hang it up, bitch!’” Disher recalls.

But this toilet-stall graffiti energized more than it angered. “We never erased it,” Disher continues. “We never really talked about it, but we left it there on purpose. I was like, hang it up? Oh really? Just watch me.”

It was no coincidence that all this was going down in the 1970s. The U.S. Education Amendments of 1972 included Title IX, which ended sexual discrimination at any education program receiving federal aid. The service academies, including West Point and the Air Force Academy, were ripe plums for women seeking equality. In exchange for at least five years of military service as officers, the academies provide a free, first-rate education—and even small stipends.

Some big guns were opposed from the get-go, however. The giant general of the Vietnam War, William Westmoreland, said accepting women at the academies was “silly,” while George C. Scott, the actor who portrayed Patton, the giant general of Word War II, called the concept “tragic.” It’s perhaps fitting that the Naval Academy doors opened to women in 1976 when academy grad Jimmy Carter was elected to the White House. To be fair, however, it was President Gerald Ford, himself a former Navy man, who’d signed the enabling legislation a year earlier.

Barbara Morris Ives, raised in Langhorne, Pa., and now living in St. Mary’s County, was unaware that the Naval Academy was accepting applications from young women until a high school guidance counselor mentioned it to her. She had several uncles in the Navy and initially planned to go to another college through the Navy ROTC program, but was lured to Annapolis by the promise of a more direct route to becoming a Naval officer. She felt male animosity right away, and the intent of many upperclassmen to run the women out.

“Some guys swore the only reason we were there was to get a ‘Mrs. Degree,’” Ives says. “Like we’d put up with so much junk just to get married.”

The women, widely dispersed among the thousands of men, experienced isolation within their isolation. Aside from spending time with their roommates, there were few opportunities for women to get together. Ives thinks the Naval Academy brass might have kept women apart by design.

“I think they were worried about what kind of bad publicity they could get if we got together and compared notes,” she says. “There were a few midshipmen that were harassing us in ways that were really not good.”

“How men and women could interact were limited back then,” adds Mary Andrews Gunther, ’81, who says being an Annapolis native with eight brothers helped her navigate her four years. She says most of her interactions with men were positive, but acknowledges, “We hadn’t developed a sense of how to walk along this mission together.”

Disher had grown up loving the mobile, military-brat lifestyle and wanted to serve her country. Poor eyesight kept her out of the Air Force Academy, but she was accepted at West Point and Annapolis. The Navy’s greater academic offerings brought her to Maryland.

“The administration did a pretty good job logistically and physically in preparing for us,” Disher says of their efforts to put in new bathrooms and arrange housing. The uniform was another matter. The plebes’ white works probably hadn’t changed since the days of three-masted frigates. Only now the Navy was thrown some curves.

“A number of us girls could not get the square bottom of the blouse [in truth, a men’s top] over our hips,” Disher says. “We ended up rolling it under and stapling it in place just to get it to sit on top of our hips.”

The patent-leather, lace-up shoes were the next problem, as the women’s version included a 3-inch heel. Plebes, she adds, pretty much have to run—or “chop”—everywhere they go, stairs included. “Within a week, a lot of the gals had shin splits or were on crutches,” Disher says. The women were told to take their shoes to the cobbler shop to have the heels cut down to half an inch. “But now you have a shoe designed for a 3-inch heel that has you leaning backwards with an awkward fit,” she adds. Soon enough, all the women were allowed to buy new shoes.

Acknowledging that female plebes would sometimes need to carry feminine hygiene products with them—and not wanting any woman singled out when it was her time of the month—was something entirely new for the Navy as well. In response, the academy initially mandated that clunky, faux-leather purses be part of the women’s uniform.

“I’m like, are you kidding?” Disher says. “I had to run up 94 stairs to my room on the fourth deck—and with this big old honking purse banging against me?”

Oddly enough, the guys complained as much about the purses as the women. They figured women could use them to carry study materials and get a leg up on all the required memorization. The purse was soon ditched for a money-belt-like pouch under the uniform—which was also inconvenient. But the tailor shop did resolve the blouse issue.

In 1998, Disher wrote a warts-and-all book about her four years at the academy, called First Class. Much of it deals with the daily struggles and indignities: pies in the face, dead mice in mailboxes, constant name-calling (dogs, dykes, ploobs, oinkers). When Disher joined the cheerleading squad, she roused more boos than cheers.

“Everything I wrote about in the book happened to somebody who told me her story firsthand,” she says. Among the more harrowing tales is the story of a woman awaking to find a male midshipman in her bed kissing her neck and pleading for more. Another describes a woman abducted from her room by three male classmates wearing pantyhose over their heads, who blindfolded and gagged her, and drank shots out of her navel.

“We hadn’t developed a sense of how to walk along this mission together.”

Neither incident got reported. Disher chalks it up partly to the sexually unenlightened times. And then there was the impulse to fit in. “I hazard a guess that anybody who was sexually assaulted didn’t report it because we were trying so hard to blend in and show we were not a problem and just another midshipman,” says 1980 graduate Stefanie Goebel. “To raise your hand and say you’ve got a problem is only going to draw attention to your gender and how you don’t fit in.”

Goebel saw the Naval Academy as a way to launch a “grand adventure underwritten by the government” and escape her dusty hometown of Midland, Texas. It’s a feat she accomplished in a 13-year naval career that took her from London to Hawaii to Guam. Now living in Northern California and out of the Navy, she volunteers for Academy Women, a mentoring group providing leadership development and career advice for female officers. That more women are in the upper ranks, she says, makes it easier for women to come forward with sexual complaints.

And they do. Reports of sexual assault have doubled at the academies in the past seven years. For the 2014-15 academic year, the Naval Academy had 25 reports of sexual assault and 13 for sexual harassment.

“It’s definitely not good that sexual assault numbers are as high as they are, and it still shows that there is a significant cultural problem,” says Goebel. “However, I think the fact that reporting is up could be a positive sign that the women—and men—who are assaulted now feel like they will receive the support they need and see justice when they come forward.”

In the end, some of the biggest changes for women in the military came well after pioneering Class of ’80. Until the early ’90s, women faced all manner of combat restrictions that prevented them from serving on most naval ships or flying most aircraft. A constant cry during the Naval Academy’s early coed days was that the women were “wasting space” since they couldn’t serve the way men could. Disher, who saw her two sons and her daughter graduate from the academy, says the elimination of combat restrictions brought a “night and day” difference to male midshipmen’s attitude toward women.

Of course, graduation day, like Induction Day, was—and remains—a biggie on the Annapolis calendar. Gathering with their families, graduating seniors toss their hats in the air and jets fly overhead. It’s smiles all around. But it turns out that the first women who entered in 1976 had one final gender snafu waiting for them on their final day.

As they walked across the stage, they received diplomas bearing their names and the inscription: “The Academic Board confers on him the degree of . . . ”

Disher says then Academy Superintendent Kinnaird McKee was mortified by the error and sent apologies to each woman along with their reprinted diplomas. She laughs about it now—about how this typo serves as a symbolic capstone of all they endured.

“I would venture to say,” Disher concludes, “that almost all of us women framed the diploma that says ‘him.’”

It’s not the oldest rivalry in college football, nor does it decide the winner of a top conference. It doesn’t have a colorful nickname like “The Iron Bowl” or feature players headed to the NFL immediately afterward. Army-Navy isn’t a lot of things that big-time college football has become, which helps make it what it is: the best rivalry in all of American sports. And this year it’s coming to Baltimore. From the pre-game pageantry, when the immaculately uniformed corps of cadets and brigade of midshipmen march onto the field in tight formation, to the post-game moments, when both teams stand at attention, sweating and shivering together during the playing of each school’s alma mater—the 70,000-plus at M&T Bank Stadium and millions more watching on TV around the globe will be treated to a spectacle unlike any other.

“It’s about recognizing those who have served, and those who are about to serve,” says Maryland Sports executive director Terry Hasseltine, who helped bring the game here. “If you are a sports fan, this is one that has to be on your bucket list.”

But peel away the pomp and circumstance and, at its core, Army-Navy (never Navy-Army) is a competitive football game. For the seniors, all but the rare exception, it’s their last. Military service, not the glamour and riches of professional football, await them when the clock hits zero.

“It was so bittersweet,” Mount Airy native and former Midshipmen receiver Billy Hubbard says of his last collegiate football game, Navy’s 30-28 victory in 2000. “I remember walking into the locker room and taking off my shoulder pads thinking, ‘I will never do that again.’ Everybody knows you’re not going to play sports forever, but you all know you’re going onto the battlefield together.”

Those words have grave meaning. Since 2001, five Navy football players and 95 U.S. Military Academy graduates have been killed in combat. They’re why, when the whistle blows, players offer a fallen opponent a hand up, why unsportsmanlike conduct penalties are unheard of, why on the second Saturday in December this game stands alone.

And why Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach, who won the Heisman Trophy at Navy in 1963, once said, “This is not a regular game, and everyone involved knows it.”

Army and Navy first squared off on the gridiron in 1890 at “The Plain” in West Point, NY. Navy won that game 24-0, while Army took the rematch 32-16 the next year in Annapolis. The rivalry, which has been unusually streaky over the years—Navy holds a 58-49-7 overall advantage based on its current 12-game winning streak—was on.

It first came to Baltimore in 1924, when Army won 12-0 at Municipal Stadium, as Memorial Stadium was once called. In 1944 it returned, this time, under the cloud of war. Undefeated Army entered the game ranked No. 1 in the country. Navy was No. 2.

“It was the biggest game of World War II,” says Randy Roberts, author of A Team for America: The Army-Navy Game That Rallied a Nation. “Here is a time when Army was never more present in the thinking of America. We’re talking about the time between D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. You have a football team that represents West Point and by extension the army rolling through its schedule kind of like Patton’s tanks through France.”

Historically (and still) staged in Philadelphia, the Army-Navy games were almost canceled during the war, according to Roberts, a Purdue University history professor. With travel restrictions for military personnel, the series moved onto the schools’ respective campuses for the 1942 and 1943 games, but those venues ultimately proved inadequate. By 1944, “these were the best two teams in the nation, so considerable pressure was brought on the government to change the venue [to a larger stadium],” Roberts says. Since the game was supposed to be played in Annapolis, it went to Baltimore.

“As a plebe . . . you’re always having to yell, ‘Go Navy, beat Army!’” 

Army, which had legends Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis, known respectively as “Mr. Inside” and “Mr. Outside” because of their tandem running prowesses, won 23-7. The teams remained relevant nationally through the ’50s and into the ’60s before the changing nature of collegiate athletics pushed them to the fringe of big-time NCAA football.

Still, the game remains critically important to the academies—the entire brigade of midshipmen and corps of cadets attend—their alums, and for three hours on a usually frigid afternoon, to fans of the purest version of college football.

“The Army-Navy game is the culmination of the entire first semester,” says Christopher Barker, a 2000 Naval Academy grad. He didn’t play football, but the Davidsonville resident tailgates before most home games. “As a plebe [a freshman], in particular, that’s what’s drilled into you from day one. As you’re squaring your corners [walking in the hallways], you’re always having to yell, ‘Go Navy, beat Army!’”

Barker recalls attending his first game as a plebe at the old Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. “Pouring rain, it was miserable, it was cold. We ended up losing, and it was such a morale hit,” he says. “Guys were crying because they thought, ‘Man, this was important.’ It’s a rite of passage.”

Then a senior at Linganore High School, Mount Airy’s Hubbard was also at the Vet that day, on a recruiting visit. His father had played sprint football (172-pound weight limit) at Navy, and his uncle played lacrosse at the academy. Four years later, after breaking into the starting Navy lineup as a senior, he played his final game a short drive east on I-70 from his childhood home.

“I kind of sensed when we played that neutral-site game in Baltimore that the fans were more for Navy,” he says. “I felt like it was our home turf. I had one catch in that game. There was a third and long, and I ended up catching a pass, but we didn’t get the first down. It was a meaningless play, but it felt like the most important play of my life.”

Navy’s close win that day salvaged a disappointing 1-10 season. At least the “one” was the one that mattered most. For 364 days, they held bragging rights over their rivals.

The following year, in 2001, Army beat Navy by nine points, the culmination of a 0-10 season for the Midshipmen and a low point for the program before its subsequent resurgence under coaches Paul Johnson, now at Georgia Tech, and Ken Niumatalolo. (Navy even managed to knock off Notre Dame three times in four tries between 2007-2010.)

“I remember Army’s crowd chanting ‘Defeated!’” says Ralph Henry, an Essex native who played for Navy from 1999 to 2003. “I won’t ever forget being on the sideline saying to myself, ‘We will never lose to these guys again.’ Twelve years later, we haven’t. [The next season] when I got the opportunity to beat them and actually have some impact on the game, there was no better feeling,” the 6-foot-2, 280-pound former defensive end continues. “Just to watch the Midshipmen in the stands jumping around, it was awesome.”

Included in Navy’s recent streak is last year’s 34-7 win over Army, and a 38-3 victory in 2007 at M&T Bank Stadium, the last time the game was played in Baltimore.

Some 15 cities fromthroughout the country submitted proposals to host the game when the academies put it up for bid in the late 2000s. In 2009, Baltimore was awarded this year’s game along with the 2016 game. Next year, and in 2017, it will be played in its traditional home, Philadelphia.

“Baltimore showed that they could meet the fiscal expectations, the community expectations, the facility expectations,” says Chet Gladchuk, Navy’s director of athletics. “The Ravens were involved, the mayor [then Sheila Dixon] was involved, the governor [Martin O’Malley] was involved.”

Why did a single football game garner such attention from so many important people and organizations? Terry Hasseltine can give you 25 million reasons.

“Army-Navy is not just a one-day football game, it’s three to four days of other activities,” he says. “We’re talking two weeks from the Christmas holiday, two weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday, during a time when the city’s pretty quiet. You have the gala [at the Baltimore Convention Center] the night before, you have alumni groups having parties. The estimation is it’s going to be between a $25 and $30 million impact. That includes a full dynamic of out-of-town spending, hospitality spending, transportation spending, ticket sales, concessions, parking.”

“We [at Navy] thought that practice was the best part of the day, because school is so tough.”

A civic-pride factor is at play as well as an afternoon in the national spotlight. The game attracts military VIPs, political dignitaries (even the President, occasionally) and the eyeballs of thirsty college football fans watching at home. Since moving to the week after the sport’s conference championships a half-dozen years ago, it’s generally the lone game on the schedule, and Army-Navy television ratings have nearly doubled, drawing 6.2 million viewers in 2013—the highest-rated game between the teams since 1999.

“The week leading up to the game, the visibility is extraordinary,” Gladchuk says. “It’s as visible in its promotion as a national championship game and, of course, it culminates with the game. We sold every ticket that we had back in July.”

Demond Brown might need to track down a few for his friends and family. The junior slot back attended Old Mill High School in Millersville. He played special teams during his first Army-Navy game, and last year got on the field for a number of offensive plays. With the game coming to his backyard, he hopes to have a greater impact on December 13.

“It’s always a special feeling when I play in Baltimore,” he says. “This will be a big deal. We have ‘Beat Army’ on our weights [in our gym]. When we’re preparing for Army, the focus increases tremendously. It reaches another level.”

Big Ralph Henry, the former Eastern Tech and Navy defensive lineman, knows this firsthand, and he knows that the Army players know it, too. When he looked to the opposing sideline he saw friends, not foes. On the field, he sensed a feeling of mutual respect, not animosity.

“We have so much in common,” he says. “We all work hard in school. No knock to any of the other colleges out there with football programs, but when it comes to academics the academies are second to none. We have to take all the engineering classes, take chemistry and physics and mathematics. Then you still, after a hard day of school, have to perform for your coaches.” At other universities, Henry adds, the football players probably hate practice, but not at the Naval Academy. “We thought that was the best part of the day, because school is so tough.”

He now lives in Beltsville, where he’s a management consultant for IBM and a lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve. The former standout remembers his last Army-Navy game vividly, and when he talks about it, he sounds as if he’s ready to strap on a helmet.

“My senior year we got them good,” he says of Navy’s 34-6 victory in 2003. “I didn’t get any sacks that game, but I racked up like 5 to 10 tackles. It was just a dominant game. We brought everything together, and we smashed them. I almost felt bad for them, to be quite honest.”

He pauses for a few seconds, contemplating. “Almost.”