The seniors playing in this weekend’s Army-Navy football game all know where they are headed after graduation.
Navy’s star quarterback, Blake Horvath, will be off to Naval flight school in Florida. His favorite receiver, Eli Heidenreich, will spend a year training as a Marine Corps ground officer.
Army linebacker Kalib Fortner, the team’s defensive captain who as a sophomore was named the 2023 Army-Navy game MVP, is headed to the infantry, one of eight Army senior cadets who will serve in that branch, the same number who will train in artillery.
But a law working its way through Congress would tweak current rules for academy athletes to expand the opportunity among those players and their classmates to defer their service to chase careers in professional sports, from the National Football League to women’s rugby.
A provision in the National Defense Authorization Act would tweak a 2022 law on who can “go pro” from the three military service academies with NCAA Division I athletic programs — Army, Navy, and the U.S. Air Force Academy. Current rules allow up to three graduates per year to commission into the reserves and delay active duty service obligation to pursue professional-level sports.
The new rule would expand that cap to 5 per class. Language making the change is included in a final version of the NDAA released this week by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.
Those selected still owe a full service obligation when their sports careers come to an end.
Army coach Jeff Monken said the policy is a fair trade between a service commitment and the rare chance for a cadet to compete on a national or international stage.
“What’s great about the policy is the chance to pursue professional sports during their most opportune years,” Monken said Tuesday. “It’s incredibly difficult to play college sports, step away from that sport, even if you’re lifting and training and doing those kinds of things, and step away from that sport and be able to return and play at a really high level. So I’m glad that there’s a pathway for them to go from college straight to professional sports.”
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The rules governing academy grads going pro have varied widely over the decades. Navy basketball star David Robinson — perhaps the most successful of all academy grad athletes — served two years on active duty in the mid-1980s before being allowed to transfer to the reserves and play in the NBA.
Rules loosened in ensuing decades, but a 2017 policy returned the standard to the same two-year active duty commitment before going pro.
The current 3-student cap for immediate duty in the reserves was put in place in 2022. Monken thinks that’s the right solution.
“At the end of that [sports] career, however long that may be, there’s a pathway for them to return to the Army, to return to their respective branch of service and to serve, which they all have a desire to do. If they didn’t have a desire to do that, they wouldn’t come to school here,” he said Tuesday.
Academy graduates generally owe at least 5 years of active duty service when they graduate, though that number can go higher depending on jobs. Air Force cadets who become pilots, for example, owe 10 years, with that clock starting the day they graduate from flight school, which can be two years after graduating from the academy (pilots commissioned from other sources owe the same 10 years).
Army officials told Task & Purpose that 20 former West Point athletes have entered the deferred program this decade, including women’s Olympic rugby player Samantha Sullivan, six NFL players, and Jacob Hurtubise, who in 2024 became the second West Point baseball player to ever make the major leagues, playing for the Cincinnati Reds.
An Air Force official said that the school has three former cadets pursuing NFL careers and one soccer player. The Navy has at least three football players and two soccer players, according to the U.S. Naval Institute.
The majority of academy athletes who turn pro are football players. Neither school has said if any players on the field this Saturday will turn pro, but at least one Army-Navy player has done so every year since 2020, mostly West Point cadets — perhaps reflecting that school’s dominant run of 13 wins in its last 18 games against its two rivals.
Best known are probably the Navy’s Robinson and Roger Staubach and the Air Force’s Chad Hennings. Both Staubach and Hennings played Hall of Fame careers with the NFL Dallas Cowboys after active-duty stints.
Navy’s Rayuan Lane is playing with the Jacksonville Jaguars this season after being approved for a spot in the reserves under the current rules when he graduated this year.
“I don’t think there should be a set number on it,” said Navy coach John Newberry. “And what better advertising for the Naval Academy and a young man playing professional sports that’s still going to do his service on the back end. I think that’s a pretty common-sense notion. In my mind. You look at Ray Lane and what he’s doing right now, what a great example that he is, and he’s out there inspiring other people. People know he went to the Naval Academy.”
