Army female cadets come out fighting
WEST POINT, N.Y. — Army cadets Kiana Stewart and DeAdre Harvey squared off in a boxing ring at the U.S. Military Academy this month, circling each other with their gloves up. After watching classmates already suffering bloody noses, the women still stayed aggressive, bouncing on the balls of their feet while delivering the occasional jab.
The female cadets are part of a first at West Point — women who must box.
Beginning this fall, West Point officials shifted from banning female students from taking the course to requiring it for all 1,000 students in the class of2020.
The move follows the Pentagon’s historic decision last year to fully integrate womeninto all combat roles for the first time, and allowing women to box marked the fall of one of the last barriers to women being allowed to do anything they are qualified to in the U.S. military.
Female cadets said they heard about the decision to mandate boxing as they were preparing to arrive on campus this summer and were surprised.
“At first I was kind of upset, but now I’m getting into it,” Harvey said, after the metallic clang of a bell marked the end of her match with Stewart. “Hitting is not something Iwant to do necessarily, hand-tohand, like, if I don’t have to.”
A year ago, West Point faced scrutiny about how many concussions cadets had suffered, particularly in boxing class.
The New York Times reported that nearly 1 in 5 concussions at West Point occurred during boxing class and that senior Army officials had discussed for months how to deflect attention from the issue before releasing the data.
Army officials say that whether to retain the program is
a separate debate from whether female cadets should be treated the same as male students and be required to take the same classes. The sport, academy officials say, teaches leadership by testing how cadets react while under attack.
Brig. Gen. DianaHolland, who took over as West Point’s first female commandant of cadets in January, said thatwhenshewas a cadet in the late 1980s, she had a hard time understanding why she wasn’t boxing and her male classmateswere.
The course this year incorporates graded twominute bouts in which women face women, and controlled sparring in which men and women can be matched up against each other.
Capt. Richard Juten, a 2006 West Point graduate who now teaches boxing, bounced around the room, shouting both encouragement and corrections. The infantry officer also stressed the need to watch for telltale signs of concussion, such as the pupil of one eye being more dilated.
Statistics released by West Point showthat cadets have suffered 185 concussions in boxing class over the past five school years, accounting for slightlymore than half of all 355 concussions recorded in physicaleducation classes.
But both numbers have declined several years in a row.
Last year, there were 38 concussions, including 20 reported among the 948 cadets who took the boxing class. Boxing concussions peaked in 2011-12, when 68 were reported among 1,022 students. That year, boxing concussions accounted for about three-fourths of the total.
But several medical studies suggest that young women are more likely to sustain concussions than men.
Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen,
the superintendent and top military officer at West Point, said the academy’s boxing program has become conservative in howit handles suspected concussions, keeping cadets away fromboxing until theymake a full recovery.
Caslen said he was approached last spring at the 40th anniversary celebration of female cadets attendingWest Point and asked by alumni to review the ban on women taking the boxing class. After receiving approval
from the Army leadership at the Pentagon, he did so because he sees boxing as a way to teach future officers how to lead in trying situations.
“Some people would say, ‘Well, can you teach cadets those skills — that tenacity and resilience — through other programs and other mechanisms?’ ” Caslen said. “Yes, you can. But boxing becomes the ... one and only event for all cadets that pits one cadet against another in full-body contact.”