Building Culture that Matters

When I was growing up, I lived in Hastings, Nebraska, a town of approximately 25,000 with three separate high schools – two relatively large public schools, and one smaller Catholic school. Though I wasn’t Catholic and had no connections to the school itself, I always loved to watch the St. Cecilia Bluehawks play basketball. I can still vividly picture them taking the court for warmups in their all-black sweatsuits, sprinting out into a highly coordinated layup line that involved complicated weaving and passing–and this was all in the first 30 seconds of warmups! The Bluehawks carried their impressive brand of discipline into the game as well–in the heyday of my childhood from 2008 to 2018, St. Cecilia went 233-55, with five state championships across those 11 seasons.

Because Hastings was a small town, I know this next piece of information through direct conversation, but even if I didn’t, it could easily and reasonably be intuited: I was not the only young person the Bluehawks made an impression on. Even though I didn’t go to school there, watching them dominate their opponents inspired me to work harder and try my best. This is why the extended streak of success, particularly impressive in a high school environment where personnel were not recruited, was able to continue for over a decade – the culture that was built early on was received and built upon by each successive class.

This semester, I’m billeted within my NROTC battalion to lead PT at Columbia University, as well as assist with PT at our unit’s primary location, SUNY Maritime (located in the Bronx). I’m particularly responsible for improving upon a “PT Mentorship Program,” wherein students who struggle with their physical fitness are assigned extra workouts with PT-proficient sailors–a program that has thus far seen a markedly low success rate. In our unit, almost a quarter of our midshipmen and sailors were unable to pass their basic physical fitness test earlier this month.

I’ve put a lot of time into thinking about how this program can be successful, meaningful, and momentum-building. I transitioned mentor sign-ups from mandatory to voluntary, and increased the agency of mentees by allowing them to select the type of workout they’d like to participate in. It’s early in the semester, so I’m not sure how much my adjustments will matter in the grand scheme of things, but I’m optimistic that these tweaks will move things in the right direction. 

In the end, though, culture can’t change in one semester, and it can’t change at the behest of one person. In order to really start to build a culture that’s built on excellence (and not just PT), it will take buy-in from personnel across all walks of life within the command. It will take a strong sense of pride in one’s work, and in one’s ability to excel in that work. The military is fortunate in that most of the tasks expected of its personnel are easy to track success, and fitness is perhaps the easiest one. My hope is that, by building the fitness level of sailors, they’ll have a clear metric that proves they can improve aspects of their lives, and extrapolate that into all facets of their military career. My hope is that we can begin to build, at the New York City NROTC Consortium, the same kind of abiding culture of excellence I revered growing up at St. Cecilia, a culture that won championships and inspired kids like me. It’s a big task, but for an organization with a mission as critical as the United States Navy, it’s undoubtedly worth the effort.