Editor’s Note: Each Wednesday, The Dispatch will be focusing on walk-on members of the Mississippi State football team.
STARKVILLE — Brett Armour’s first choice was the United States Naval Academy, but the Naval Academy ritually admits less than 10 percent of its applicants. When he got word he wasn’t accepted, the Brighton, Tennessee, native went searching for a ROTC program he could find a spot in.
He wasn’t expecting it to be Mississippi State’s, but it was. A call to the Army ROTC program on campus got his foot in the door; once he did, his father offered up an innocent suggestion.
Why not join the football team?
Armour made the team and has balanced the demands of college football and ROTC ever since. It even impresses his fellow cadets: Armour said he’s often asked how he does it.
“I’m just used to it. It just came together,” Armour said. “The schedule has some conflicts, but for the most part it works out.”
Armour says it takes constant communication with both programs to make sure the time demands for both are met, but he’s helped out by one general norm: most daily ROTC events take place in the early morning hours while most in-season football activities go on in the afternoon. It makes for long days, but Armour wouldn’t have it any other way — even when it hurts.
It’s not uncommon for Armour to have miles to run or the ever-feared ruck, a miles-long march while carrying heavy field equipment, all before a day on the practice field. Armour remembered one day when a 12-mile ruck in the morning left his feet blistered to the point where he was hobbling around the complex and practice field.
“He is totally involved in the program,” said SFC Luis Vazquez, who Armour reports to in the ROTC program. “He participates during class and brings opinions and his own leadership styles to the program. It makes it easier to open avenues for other cadets to buy into the program, be able to pull from him and create their own leadership styles.”
Armour echoed a similar benefit: “It’s been helpful because you get to meet all these people from different walks of life. In the ROTC program they have this different mind-set that you don’t get here in football, and in football you get this mind-set of the competitiveness, strain and everything else that applies to the Army.”
The schedule he lives daily is impressive for a man that had to prove himself just to get into the program.
Armour is an offensive lineman, so his size — 6-foot-1, 280 pounds — is unusual for cadets; he said the height-weight standard for cadets says he should weigh 190 pounds. Given that size, Armour had to earn his spot through the ROTC’s physical fitness tests when he got on campus; now he has a student-athlete waiver that allows him to be a part of the ROTC program at his weight, with the mandate that he lose the weight once he leaves MSU.
Armour is looking forward to dropping his offensive lineman weight, even if the road there is going to be brutal. He is slated for a 30-day camp at Fort Knox in Kentucky over the summer; passing that test moves him a step closer to his ultimate goal: Army Ranger.
Armour’s dedication to his future service is no surprise: his grandfather, Estel, was in the Navy and served at Pearl Harbor, and his brother Blake is new to both the football team and the Air Force ROTC this fall.
Vasquez has no doubt that when football is behind Brett Armour and his undivided focus can shift to the military, he is going to succeed.
“That says the man knows what he wants, when he wants it and how he wants it,” Vazsquz said. “It says he’s willing to put in the work to accomplish what he wants to accomplish.”
Follow Dispatch sports writer Brett Hudson on Twitter, @Brett_Hudson
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