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Mid run takes the long way to Army-Navy game

Some time after lunch Friday afternoon, a group of 150 midshipmen got a rousing sendoff from the Brigade of Midshipmen and began the yearly trek to deliver a football to the parking lot of the stadium where the Army-Navy game is played.

The rules are simple: Under no circumstances can a midshipman drop the football; each midshipman must run between one and two miles, but those who want to can run longer; the ball must keep moving at all times; a Navy van must follow to pick up stragglers.

Throughout the academy, the 13th Company is the unluckiest of the brigade’s 30 companies, and every year, its members are sent on the run, not so much to deliver a football — there are enough of those already at the stadium — as to get the company and its bad karma off the yard before the biggest sporting event of the Naval Academy year.

The present 13th Company officer, Lt. Marlon Terrell, has been on both sides of the tradition.

Before graduating from the Naval Academy in 2002, Terrell was fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to be assigned to another company.

“It’s one of those things I really appreciated,” he said. “That the brigade would provide that kind of support in getting the bad luck out of the hall so we could guarantee a win.”

But Terrell sees it differently now.

He points out that four 13th Company members are Navy football players, that one of his students is a soccer player, and another, company operations officer Midshipman 1st Class Katie Traster, took the initiative to plan a new route for the company to M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore.

“We don’t consider ourselves to be bad luck at all,” said Terrell, a submarine officer in the fleet. “We consider ourselves to be the best.”

In years past, the game has been played in Philadelphia, and the company sent its midshipmen on the back roads of Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania to make their 123-mile delivery, but this year’s contest is 90 miles closer to the Naval Academy. So Traster created an alternate route that took the company past the Pentagon, the White House, the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials and the Washington Monument. And when the last group approaches the stadium Saturday morning, the group will have traveled 123 miles.

During the run, groups of three or four midshipmen and company staffers will take turns running between one and two miles, before passing the ball to a second group who will then continue the run.

Since the 13th Company began its run in 1981, Navy has won 13 Army-Navy games, lost 11 and tied one.