Naval Academy

In both the classroom and running track, Liberty standout Ashley Ross has shown a knack for getting things done in a quick and efficient manner. She maintains a 4.4 GPA and will be graduating a year early to attend the Naval Academy in the fall. She first plans to add to her impressive track resume as she closes out her high school career competing in four events (200 meters, 400, 800 relay, 1600 relay) at this week's Class 2A state track and field championships. The No. 2 Lions are the defending champions.

The first African-American to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy has died, according to an announcement from the school Wednesday. Wesley Brown started at the academy in 1945, after the first five black men to attend failed to complete their first year there. He graduated 370th out of nearly 800 graduates in 1949, gaining national media attention, and went on to have a 20-year career in the Navy. Brown, who was in his 80s, was a veteran of World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and spent time with the Navy working in various other countries.

It was heartening to see current and past midshipmen speak openly of the salutary effect on the U.S. Naval Academyof repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy ("Mids describe smooth transition from 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,'" May 21). Your article, however, overlooked one important consequence of this change - the impact on the classroom. Since arriving at the Naval Academy 12 years ago, I have felt that one of its greatest strengths is the bond of trust between faculty and students, a bond much more profound than the enforced respect of military culture.

They are plebes no longer. It took two hours, 10 minutes and 13 seconds Tuesday for the freshman class at the U.S. Naval Academy to have one of its own knock a plebe's "dixie cup" hat from the top of the greased Herndon Monument and replace it with a midshipman's hat, symbolically morphing the group into 4th-class Mids. Andrew Craig, 19, of Tulsa, Okla., achieved the goal in the noisy and slippery event that drew between 800 and 1,000 plebes, officials said. Tradition holds that the student who caps the monument will be first in the class to reach the rank of admiral, though that has yet to happen.

When his roommate at the Naval Academy said jokingly last year that Andrew Atwill was a homosexual, the midshipman told him to cut it out. His friend didn't know it, Atwill says, but he really was gay — and under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, it could have jeopardized his military career. This year, the first since the Clinton-era policy was repealed, Atwill says change has come to the academy. And talking about his sexual orientation, rather than being a career-ending offense, has rallied midshipmen to his defense.

They crawled through muddy trenches. They did sit-ups in the Severn River. They performed a mock evacuation of an injured pilot. And they kept on going. Midshipmen completing their first year at the Naval Academy endured the rigorous 14-hour Sea Trials on Tuesday. The annual training exercise put the approximately 1,000 plebes through 30 challenging events from predawn darkness through late afternoon. "One, two, three, 10," hollered plebes of the 10th Company as they counted squats in the water before flopping backward with a roar.

A former midshipman who says she was raped twice while at the Naval Academy has filed a federal lawsuit seeking to force officials to improve their response to sexual assaults at the service academies. In a complaint filed Friday, the woman, now 22, says she was raped on separate occasions by two different midshipmen. After she reported the assaults to an academy counselor, she says, the academy forced her to drop out. The woman and a co-plaintiff, a former U.S. Military Academy cadet who says she was raped by a fellow student there, say officials at the two academies tolerate sexual assault and discourage victims of attacks from reporting them.

No. 1 Calvert Hall's coaches say their junior pitcher Ben Deaver has "tremendous upside. " The 6-foot-3, 195-pound right-hander has good repetition in his delivery, movement on his fastball, a confidence-destroying slider and a curve ball that assistant coach Brooks Kerr says is almost a guaranteed out. "When he has two strikes on a batter, you can expect the curve and it's a done deal," Kerr said of Deaver, who has received interest from...

Capt. Herbert Hamilton Ward III, a retired career naval officer who was active in Upper Chesapeake Bay environmental matters and other issues, died March 17 from complications of a blood clot at Gilchrist Hospice in Towson. The Broadmead retirement community resident was 91. The son of a lawyer and a homemaker, Herbert Hamilton Ward III was born and raised in Wilmington, Del., where he graduated in 1939 from Friends School. He was a member of an accelerated wartime class at the Naval Academy, from which he graduated in 1943.

Jeffrey H. Douglas, a former Caroline County Department of Public Works supervisor, died of heart failure Wednesday at Seasons Hospice in Northwest Hospital. The Baltimore resident was 59. Born and raised in Lutherville, Mr. Douglas was a 1972 graduate of Dulaney High School, where he was an outstanding lacrosse player and kicker for the varsity football team. He attended the Naval Academy and Salisbury University. He moved to the Eastern Shore in 1978 and had lived in Still Pond, Denton and Preston.