The Naval Academy prepares its midshipmen to rule the seas. Its men's basketball team, under the direction of head coach Jon Perry, is conquering a very different terrain this season.
"I talked to them about the 'Law of Mount Everest,'" Perry said of his first team meeting. "Every game's a little bit higher on the climb, every game gets a little bit harder. We're now to the point where we're at Base Camp 4 of Everest -- as they call it the 'death zone' -- and that's the Patriot League conference tournament. So if you lose you go home.
"And the hardest part of the climb on Everest is getting to there and finishing, right? Getting to the top."
John C. Maxwell's "Law of Mount Everest" states, "As the challenge escalates, the need for teamwork elevates." It should be no surprise that Navy has tremendous teamwork. What might come as a surprise is that Navy is in the midst of its best season since David Robinson called the Yard home, all while under the direction of a first-year head coach and boasting one of the sport's best defenses thanks to an assistant coach who was out of the game completely a year ago.
And the Midshipmen are doing it, of course, while preparing for careers far away from a basketball court.
"You've got to be able to focus on what's most important, and for these guys, it's their academics, it's their military obligations and then basketball is third," Perry said. "And they know that if they're not doing well academically or militarily, then I'm gonna take away basketball from them. And [basketball] ... that's a fun part of their day."
The Navy Midshipmen's climb of Mount Everest is coming both despite and thanks to the odds. Consider the following:
- Entering this season, Navy had one Patriot League regular-season title, back in 1997. It only has four conference regular-season titles ever.
- Navy has not been to the NCAA Tournament since 1998.
- The service academies have struggled historically. Army is one of three teams to never make the NCAA Tournament despite being eligible for every single one, since 1939. Air Force hasn't made an NCAA Tournament since 2006. The Falcons are 7-54 over the past two seasons and fired their coach this year.
- Navy, like its fellow Division-I service academies, does not offer Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) compensation, nor does it bring in transfers -- two bedrocks of today's college athletics roster building.
"Because of the mission of the school and the shared experiences there, they bond, they connect," Perry said. "There's a larger purpose here, and I think that translates and carries over into the locker room and onto the court. The older we get, the better we get, because we're able to retain our guys, and they're playing for the name on the front."
In a world where rosters are deconstructed and reconstructed every offseason, Navy has 81.3% minutes continuity, which is Kenpom's measure of which players are playing the same minutes they did the year prior. For reference, only one other team, Harvard, is above 65%. The national average is 25%, by far the lowest it's ever been.
"It starts with talent," senior captain Mike Woods said. "We have good players, you know, it's not that just our players are old; we're really talented as well. But I think it helps with holding guys accountable too.
There's point guard Austin Benigni, the Patriot League Player of the Year. Do-it-all forward Donovan Draper averages nine points, seven rebounds and nearly three assists per game, and then defensively nabs 2.1 steals per contest. Aidan Kehoe, a 6'11" first-team All-Patriot League center, leads Division I with a 73.6% field goal percentage and was also named Patriot League Defensive Player of the Year.
Those seniors have the Mids 25-6 overall with a 17-1 mark in Patriot League play. The 25 wins are the most for a Navy team that didn't include Robinson. The 17-1 league record is tied for the best by any team since the Patriot League expanded to an 18-game schedule.
Navy clinched the regular-season league title on Feb. 18, mashing Lehigh by 23. All it's done since then is win at Army by 18, at Loyola-Maryland by 27 and against Colgate by 16. The Mids may have cut down the nets and celebrated upon clinching the title -- "I want our guys to have fun," Perry explained. "'Joy' is a word we use a lot in our program." -- but they knew they had more work to do.
"Ultimately, we all came together at the at the beginning of the year with the the mindset of 'We're going to tournament this year,'" Benigni said. "So we enjoyed that night, had a good time together, but once we got to practice the next day it was back to business."
After all, this is a team that knows the pain of coming close. Last year as the conference tournament's No. 5 seed, Navy upset No. 4 seed Boston University and No. 1 seed Bucknell on the road. But in the title game, the Midshipmen lost to American, 74-52.
Coaches make thousands of tiny decisions throughout a basketball season, many that have little to do with the games themselves. Perry learned that early. He had been an assistant at Navy under Ed DeChellis for a dozen years before getting the top job. When DeChellis retired after the season, Perry got the keys to a team coming off a devastating loss.
"I went back and forth on, 'Do you talk about it? Do you not talk about it?' and I just kind of went with my gut and said, 'We're gonna talk about this thing a lot,'" Perry said. "... I'll pull that bracket out every once in a while, say, 'Hey, remember, this is where we were at, and this is where we're trying to get back to.'"
Keeping the Mount Everest analogy, Base Camp 1 was the offseason work, Base Camp 2 was the non-conference schedule, Base Camp 3 was the conference season, and now Base Camp 4 has arrived. They couldn't skip steps or look ahead.
"In the Navy, we say, 'Keep a 5-meter target' -- keep our targets right in front of us so we can maintain focus throughout the journey," Woods said.
Base Camp 1 was filled with a combination of hope, motivation and uncertainty. After DeChellis retired, Benigni entered the transfer portal. He wanted to explore his options, but more importantly, he wanted to see if Navy would hire someone who wanted him there in the first place. When Perry got hired, Benigni returned. After all, Perry had not only recruited Benigni, but he had done so in unconventional fashion, streaming Peach Jam games as COVID-19 prevented in-person scouting.
Benigni's path to Navy was an unconventional one, too. Hailing from The Woodlands, Texas, Benigni had a handful of other D-I offers, including from in-state programs. He had no familial connections to the Navy and knew little about the Academy. But Perry's pitch spurred his interest, and out of all his visits, Benigni got along with Navy's players best.
Benigni showed flashes in his first year before jumping to 17 points per game as a sophomore. That jump and the jumps since are no coincidence. Navy hired Jordan Lyons after Benigni's freshman season, and Benigni reached out as soon as he heard the news. The former Furman star who once made an NCAA-record 15 threes in one game helped Benigni change the mechanics of his shot -- namely his footwork -- between his sophomore and junior seasons. Benigni made 10,000 threes during one block of offseason practices. He has risen from a 20% 3-point shooter his first season to 46% this season.
Tonight's Patriot League tournament quarterfinal against Bucknell will be his 128th game with Navy, passing Robinson and Vernon Butler for most in program history. He passed Robinson for most career free throws made (606) on Saturday. Having his name in the same sentence as Robinson, a 2009 Hall of Fame inductee -- has been a "pretty surreal feeling," Benigni said.
With Benigni back in the fold, the Midshipmen had their engine back, and with many seniors and other experienced players around him returning, they had motivation, too.
"That was an improbable run, and as we got into this spring, we started talking about it being inevitable," Perry said.
Led by Woods, the team formulated goals. Woods printed them out, got the paper signed by the incoming freshman class later in the offseason and keeps it on his desk. He has ticked off nearly every box.
Though Perry had sensed this group could be special last season, the players started to sense it early this season. Kehoe said the first game opened his eyes. The Mids hadn't won their opener since his freshman year, when he hardly saw the court. This time, he had 19 points on 9 for 11 shooting as Navy blew out Presbyterian. Benigni, meanwhile, pointed to hanging with Penn State (lost by nine) and North Carolina (lost by 12) on the road as confidence boosters, even if they were losses.
Navy went 8-5 in non-conference action and started 4-0 in the Patriot League before losing at American, the same result that had ended the previous season.
The Mids still haven't lost since.
They avenged the American loss with an 82-73 win in early February. Navy's current 13-game winning streak is the second-longest active in the country, only behind undefeated Miami (Ohio).
Benigni (18.1 PPG) and Kehoe (15.4) spearhead the offense.. Kehoe leads the conference in offensive and defensive rebounding rate, and his 115 offensive rebounds this season are top-10 nationally. He's raised his field goal percentage every year in Annapolis and is on track to set both the Navy and Patriot League record this season.
"It's the culmination of every year just getting better, getting better, taking steps," Kehoe said, crediting the coaching staff. "We really just talked about getting to your move that works, any side, have your go-to move and then you have a go-to counter. Footwork was a big thing."
Kehoe, who grew up near Army and whose grandfather served in the Navy, took a winding path to get to the Academy, too: He held zero Division-I offers after his senior season of high school.
On one hand, he wanted to take a post-grad year to get more attention. On the other, he had a Division-II offer, and his peers were leaving for college. That included his twin sister, headed to New Orleans to play volleyball. Leaning on his parents' support, Kehoe went to the Canterbury School, grabbed Army's and Navy's attention and chose Annapolis over West Point.
But defense is where this group hangs its hats. Playing at a slow pace helps -- the Midshipmen are fifth in scoring defense nationally -- but they're effective on a per-possession basis, too, ranking 15th. That's a development more than a quarter-century in the making.
Back in 2000, Scott Wagers took his first college coaching job as an assistant at East Tennessee State under DeChellis. On the roster was a high-basketball-IQ guard named Jon Perry.
"I'd put a press in, and I remember one day, he was like, 'Well they're gonna throw over the top of that, coach,'" Wagers recalled fondly. "And he was on the sideline, kind of chirping, and I turned around and looked at him and said something to him, like, 'You get out there,' you know? But the point he was making, he was dead on."
It was the start of a decades-long partnership. Perry eventually joined the ETSU coaching staff alongside Wagers under DeChellis. When DeChellis got the Penn State job, Perry followed. Wagers stayed, but the two remained in touch, sharing schemes, philosophies and a friendship.
Wagers eventually landed at South Florida in 2017-18. After the Bulls fired Brian Gregory following the 2022-23 season, Wagers was out of a job but didn't want to put his kids through yet another move. So he decided to stay in Tampa, keeping a promise to his daughter that she'd graduate high school where she had started it. Wagers started a restoration company, finding plenty of work due to the hurricanes. He informally helped some coaching friends in the area, but he was basically out of basketball.
