The Boy Scouts of America, the Girl Scouts of the USA, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, 4-H, and NJROTC are synonymous with developing young minds, growing character, and developing leadership skills in children and teenagers. However, one national youth organization, with a unit in Santa Rosa County, falls under the radar more than these others, the U.S. Naval Sea Cadet Corps (USNSCC).
Jill Hickerson, Whiting Field Sea Cadets parent’s auxiliary said youth as young as 10 years old up to 18 can join. They learn what it means to be in the Navy, she said. The program splits between youth ages 10 to 12 who start in the US Navy League Cadets, while youth ages 13 to 18 are US Naval Sea Cadets and begin their career with a two week recruit training, a sort of boot camp.
“It’s a step up from the scouts,” Hickerson said. “They wear the Navy Working Uniforms, dress whites, and blues,” she said, and they’re subject to uniform inspections. Once a month for the whole year, she said, cadets spend the weekend at Whiting Field sleeping in bunks, doing physical training and community service, training for color guard, and learning from speakers, which may be corpsmen or crash and rescue personnel. “The cadets do testing and rank up,” Hickerson said. The curriculum they learn from is the same lessons used by enlisted Navy personnel. She said the ranks go up to chief, but at Whiting Field, Petty Officer Third Class Fred Guy is the highest ranking cadet.
Exciting opportunities come around during the summer for cadets to attend trainings covering specialized Navy training such as SCUBA diving and medical corpsman training. Summer trainings happen throughout both the United States and abroad. Whiting Field has had past cadets travel as far away as Arkansas, Michigan and Texas. Hickerson said just this May the cadets worked the Ferguson Air Show and even received some flight training. Colton Hergott, a seaman apprentice at the time, Hickerson said, went through helicopter training at Whiting Field last summer.
The practical result of going through the USNSCC is an advanced pay grade upon enlistment, should cadets decide upon joining the Navy.
While the unit at Whiting Field, Hickerson said, performs a lot of community service, like the flag ceremony for Memorial Day and the VFW POW ceremony, the cadets take home a lot of leadership skills. “My son is much more self confident now, more of a leader,” she said. “He’s 14 now and has a lot under him. They [the league cadets] look up to him and that helps with his self confidence and gives him some direction,” she said. She also said last summer saw a lot of cadets graduate and about half went into the military. Alexander Brinkerhoff and Rebecca Corley, Hickerson added, went on to become midshipmen.
To find out more about the USNSCC, visit http://www.seacadets.org/, or look up Whitintg Field Sea Cadets on Facebook. To find out about registration, contact Lieutenant Commander Anthony Chandler at 626-2116.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: The Navy’s best kept secret