Interview with football player and ex Navy SEAL Dave White
What is it like to be a Navy SEAL, you ask? My Uncle Dave played football at the Naval Academy and then served as a SEAL. His athletic background, body type, and tenacity to win got him through the training. I grew up hearing his stories and taking his advice and I wanted to share that with you all. See below our conversation!
Some background: Dave has a Bachelors of Science in Economics from the Naval Academy. The Academy is located in Annapolis, Maryland. He served on SEAL team 8. He grew up in Buellton, California, lived in Florida for awhile, and now resides in Oklahoma. He has six kids: Tyler, Parker, Morgan, Jessica, Hunter, and Michael. He is married to his college sweetheart Lisa. She went to Johns Hopkins, which is located in Baltimore, Maryland. Dave is currently a landlord and makes money from his investments and also is a pilot. He has a private runway on his 85 acre ranch in Oklahoma where he flies his biplane.
Q: When did you start playing sports?
A: In second grade my mom signed me up for little league baseball in Santa Maria. That season we got first place. Our team was super good. I still remember my coach and teammates. I had a tough coach, he was a mean guy but fair and good. It was a great team. I was tiny. The coach put me at second base. I figured out that I could throw and field. My batting average was .000. I got a couple of foul balls and the crowd went wild. I was voted most improved with a lot more room to improve. We ended up with the first place trophy and I was stoked about it.
I went on to play baseball into high school. I played second base, then center field because I was fast and enjoyed catching long balls. I learned how to hit since second grade and I was batting leadoff. Baseball was probably my best sport. Junior year I stopped playing because the baseball team at my high school had a reputation for being pot heads and I wasn’t interested in being a part of that. I got bored with the sport. I played football and that was my favorite.
When I quit baseball, I joined the FFA (Future Farmers of America) and Livestock Judging team. When the baseball coach found out I quit to join the FFA he wasn’t happy. I discovered a lot of country girls. Genius. It was great for dating.
Q: When did you start playing competitive?
A: I was competitive from the beginning in second grade.
Q: When did you start playing football?
A: My mom didn’t let me do football at first because she believed that it’s too dangerous. When we moved from Santa Maria to Buellton, all of my friends were playing football and they kept asking if I’d play. Finally in fifth grade my coach came over and talked to my mom. He told her, “Dave’s not going to get hurt, I’ll take care of him, Dave’s a good athlete, let’s get him started in football”. I joined the YFL (Youth Football League). I played 13 seasons of football. I really enjoyed it.
Initially I was a center on offense, I always played corner back or defensive back. We never won a game fifth through eighth grade. We tied one game 3-3. We were a bunch of sorry losers until high school freshman year. That year we never lost a game. It was the same guys. What does that tell you as a coach?
The same team started losing again when we got different coaches. I moved to running back on offense and stayed on defense. In high school senior year I was corner back on defense and half back on offense. It was my least favorite year because I was on every special team, offense, and defense. I got the ball 25-30 times per game so I was exhausted the whole game trying to catch my breath. I wanted a break.
We got into the CIF (California State championship). I got all-league for quarterback and best back for being a tail back. That was the end of my high school career. I had a lot of fun, the guys were great, but it wore me out. There’s a big difference when you play on one side of the ball because in college I played on one side and I got the chance to regroup, get excited to get back into the game, take a breather.
I wasn’t recruited to the Naval Academy. I got in academically. I didn’t expect to play sports there. I found out there was another team called the “lightweight” team. You had to weigh in at 158 pounds and play on Saturday. It was a hugely popular sport. We played against the Ivy League teams and West Point. It is expensive to fuel the football team so we pretty much only played against the rich schools.
My grades were suffering but I decided to try lightweight football. I go to the first practice and there were 500 kids there. It covered the whole field when we were stretching. I thought, “I’m never going to make this team” because there were so many people trying out! I’m stretching in the middle of this crowd with seven or eight coaches roaming around looking at clipboards doing some serious weening down. They had to eliminate the crowd to fifty to sixty players.
I’m petrified because I’m a plebe and all of a sudden I hear a coach yelling “MIDSHIPMAN WHITE! WHERE IS MIDSHIPMAN DAVE WHITE?”. I thought to myself “oh my god I’m already in trouble”. I raise my hand and a crowd of coaches come to me. The defensive head coach and offensive head coach come to me. They said, “what are you going to play, offense or defense?” I said “uuuuuhhh defense?” They said “that’s right get in the defense group”.
It turns out they did some background check on me. A coach named Glenn Alberto from New Jersey went to the coaches and told them, “you have to look for this guy Dave White” and told them about my high school accomplishments and awards. I thought I may never play on offense. From the very first practice, I was first string defense. I made it.
Glenn Alberto came up to me and gave me some advice. He said that when the coaches give you all these drills and tell you not to worry about it, don’t listen to them. You better go 100%. You better try hard even if they say don’t worry about it. I listened to him and I was giving 100% the whole time.
I made all-league as corner back, free safety, and I got a letter sweater out of it. It was a golden ticket at the Naval Academy. With a letter sweater you can’t tell you’re a plebe because there is no marking. It’s rare for a freshman to get a letter sweater. In December of my freshman year I was rocking it everywhere and no one could tell I was a freshman. After that, I was grinding as a free safety sophomore and junior year.
I always had incredible coaches. Our defense got so good that no one would throw anymore. They were afraid to throw against us because it would just get intercepted or knocked down. If your defense is good, you don’t play much. I got a little bored. I thought I might not play my senior year so I went and tried rugby. My coach found out about it and sat me down in the off season. He asked me what position I wanted to play. I said running back because I was bored with being a free safety. He said, “okay, you’re going to be our full back in the wishbone”.
So I’m the full back in the wishbone my senior year and it’s like high school again. I’m getting the ball 20-30 times per game and I would just run people over. My goal was never to score a touchdown. It was just to gain 5 yards. I was going to that line no matter what. I had the second highest yards per run in the league. I would never get 15 yards. We’d get all the way down the yard and they’d give it to someone else to score the touchdown.
I remember, the very first play I was a full back and we were in our end zone. They hand me a ball and. it opens up and I ran 99 yards for a touchdown. Of course it gets called back. I didn’t score again until the very last game of the season. Our final game was against Army and it was an unbelievably great game. We came from behind and won. I have the game ball still do this day.
The biggest irony was that after the season they called me in the office and they said they selected me for the touchdown club. They inducted me into the Annapolis touchdown club. That means I was the MVP of the team. The touchdown club was a group of selected people of all of the football teams in Annapolis, including the high schools, the big football team, and the lightweights. I had this huge Heisman looking trophy. I met Lisa the summer before that year so she made it to that last game.
It’s a tough day when you realize it’s going to be your last game. It’s sad but it’s time to move on. I made the decision to try to be a navy SEAL. My brain was tired and I didn’t want to do anything that required studying a lot. I managed to get into SEAL training. My body loved the training. During BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL), I was getting hammered, they had physical therapy, and they would grind every part of your body to exhaustion.
They started noticing me. They noticed that I’m the only guy that is still going. This guy Ensign White. One day they handed me a “performance chit” during PT which normally wasn’t good. If you got a few of those then you’re gone. They told me “you better look at it”. It was actually a good one. It was saying that I was doing a great job. everyone was like what the hell, they’ve never heard of that. I got two or three of those.
I was the only guy that gained weight. I gained five pounds. Of course I was tired, beat to hell, but my body type was perfectly designed for what they were making us do. I felt like I was still an athlete. At the end of the day I didn’t have any homework, no tests, finals, formulas, nothing to remember. The way I got through SEAL training was I just had to get through this day and when I’m done then I’m just done with it. It’s marked off the list and it’s over.
Q: What was it like playing football at the Naval Academy?
A: When you’re playing a varsity sport, you have to put in the time that the sport requires, but you still have 18-20 school credit hours. You still have to measure up academically. You still have to carry a 2.0 GPA and you have the military obligations.
Those obligations include uniform inspections, which means we line up and get inspected before every meal, our rooms get inspected, it was like bootcamp. We had formal inspections where we really had to shine. We had to write reports, and as you got higher in your class (freshman. to senior class), you write evaluations of your men, your squad.
You have to memorize stuff every day. You had to memorize what’s on the menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. You had to know the chain of command from the President of the United States all the way down to you. You have to know how many people and who would have to die before you’re president.
At any moment, an upperclassman could ask you what is on the menu for the day for all meals. If you got in trouble, you would have several hours of marching on the weekends. If you got in trouble, you were suspended and restricted to your room for months.
My roommate got in trouble for being drunk underage. He was suspended and restricted to his room for 6 months. His GPA went from a 2.0 to a 3.8. He almost finished with the 3.8 but then it snowed. When it snows, if you shovel the snow, you get a day out of suspension for every hour that you shovel. He shoveled and shoveled and shoveled and got out of suspension early. So he ended with a 2.1 GPA. He was a soccer player, and people called him Goldie Locks.
After graduating at the Academy, you owe 5 years of service. He was going to graduate at the very bottom of the class so he knew he wasn’t going to graduate high enough in the class to do what he really wanted to do, which was be a pilot. Service selection night goes in order from top ranked down to the bottom ranked. The top ranked person gets whatever he wants. By the end of the ranking, you’re going to be on a gray ship. That year, they needed pilots so badly they opened up pilot slots all the way to the bottom of the class. That day he realized he’s going to flight training. He ended up flying F14 fighter pilots. Lucky dude. He put minimum effort and got to pilot school. That’s a great way to do it.
I don’t know what it’s like to go to a normal college but at the Naval Academy it was something else on top of everything else you had to do. As a freshman, you had to figure out how to do above a 2.0 GPA. I wasn’t sure I could play football because of my grades. I had to make choices about my extracurricular activities. I was elected as class president my freshman year but I had to get rid of that, there was no time. Sophomore year I wasn’t a plebe anymore so I was able to spend more time on academics and get my grades up to B’s instead of C’s.
I ended up graduating barely above the top half of the class. The main difference is you’re still responsible for a ton of academics. The required courses at the Naval Academy were much different than at other schools. If you look at my transcript, you would think I was an engineer. I took differential equations, three semesters of calculus, two semesters of chemistry, two semesters of physics, thermodynamics, etc.
Q: Do you feel like you would have done a different degree if you weren’t a student-athlete?
A: I liked economics and I was good at it, I could kind of understand it. We had enough math and science classes so I wanted something different. If I majored in engineering, that would be difficult taking a break from studying for serving in the military. I feel like if you want to do engineering then you need to go straight into it after graduating so you remember everything. I chose economics because it was something that I could do to get me through school. I didn’t want to be an economist, I just wanted to graduate.
Q: How did playing college football at the Naval Academy prepare you to be a Navy SEAL? Did you go straight into BUDS right after graduating school?
A: Nothing can prepare you for being a Navy SEAL. Being an athlete helps. The top sports of SEALs were wrestling and swimming. The number 1 thing that they played was chess. Probably because of strategy. They found when they did a study of characteristics of people who make it through training they played chess, swam, and were wrestlers. SEAL training is a mental game. It is so physical that it becomes a question of how to get through it and not quit.
I just broke it down into very small chunks. The harder it got, the smaller the chunk I convinced myself to get through. I just tried to get through one event at a time of torture through hell week. I’ll worry about the other stuff later. If you think of the whole week, you’ll just quit. Hell week is 6 days with no sleep. They beat you into the dirt. You get maybe 4 hours of sleep the whole week. My goal was to make it to the third day because if you made it to that day, you’re too invested so you’re not going to quit. You get something for that effort.
Once I got to the third day, no one was going to quit anymore. BUDS is 6 months long. Hell week is the 5th week of BUDS. They make hell week toward the beginning to get rid of as many guys as they can. That way they don’t have to teach them land warfare and diving.
There are three phases to BUDS. Phase one was all physical. The routine is to go to PT, run, and swim all day every day. The fifth week is Hell Week. After that you get one week to recover.
Phase two is land warfare. You go to the San Clemente Island and they taught us how to shoot and blow stuff up.
Phase three is diving with a pure oxygen rig. After that, you’re still not a SEAL, you just graduated BUDS. It’s an accomplishment in itself.
Once you get to your team, you have six more months of training with them. If they like you, they keep you. You have to prove yourself to the team. The team wants to see you and make sure you’re a team guy. There were still a few more guys that got booted which would be a real bummer to make it through BUDS and then the team boots you. I saw it happen which is kind of sad. Day one of BUDS, there were 105 guys. 13 of us made it. 3 were officers, 10 enlisted.
Q: How did you spend your free time when you retired from the Navy? How was the transition out of that routine?
A: When I got out of the teams in 1992, I started my own company doing laminating services. I patented a way to fold up paper laminated flat. I had made a way to laminate maps folded up. That’s how you got around back in those days was paper maps, there wasn’t GPS yet. The paper maps we had were big and got torn up a lot. We used to laminate our plans in the Navy but they couldn’t fold up. I figured if they could fold up better that would be cool. I patented the idea and that took off. I had that company for 18 years. It enabled me to do other things like buy properties and now I’m a landlord.
Q: You went back to being a SEAL briefly later on in life. How was that different than when you were in your twenties?
A: Entirely different. Oil tankers are those giant things that pick up oil and go drop it off somewhere else. They needed people to guard the oil tankers. The SEALs that were doing the job were doing a really great job.
The word got out that they want to put retired SEALs on the boats so the call went out for all kinds of ex Navy SEALs. They asked me if I wanted to go so Lisa said I could go. I went for two months in the Indian Ocean with 3 others. We were on oil tankers that were going up and down the African coast. We had to make sure no one got on the boat. Sometimes it was scary but not really. As soon as guy saw it was armed they would go to another easier target so it worked.
Q: Have you considered being a football coach?
A: I did coach when I first got out of the Navy. I went to Santa Ynez and helped coach the JV football team at the high school for two or three years. I helped coach defense. Nothing major. It was just fun to go and work with them. I had a bit of a reputation with the team. They liked me and I did the conditioning. They felt cool to be conditioned by a former Navy SEAL. Several of those players ended up going to training and credited me for inspiring them. I saw them later in life and several of those guys told me I inspired them. I was honored.
Q: What advice would you give to someone who is recently done playing a sport?
A: It always looks good on the resume that you played sports. I got through a lot of interviews just talking about my athletic career and nothing to do with the job. I think that employers like to see that. They like to see that you are competitive, got more than just good grades, and you’re able to do something more than playing competitive sports. There’s a good chance that you’re going to be competitive in whatever industry if you were competitive in sports so don’t be afraid to talk about sports in the interview.
Try to stay in shape. It isn’t that easy. It loses its priority because you’re not doing it for anything than just for your own self. I’ve slacked off but then I get back into it. When I go to the gym now, I limit myself to an hour. I set myself a schedule of what I’m going to do when I get to the gym.
When I first started doing this routine, it was hard because I was out of shape. I told myself I’m not going to increase any of these numbers. I’m going to do this. If it becomes too easy, that’s my reward. I go to the gym now, I do my routine of 60 sit ups, treadmill or elliptical for 30 minutes, and then bench press or dip bar for 3 sets of 15. That’s it, that’s an hour. It’s gotten easy. That’s my reward for making this routine a priority. It means I’m in shape. I don’t have to get in better shape. When I go to the gym I know it’s going to be easy because I have been going. If I don’t go, I get punished. It helps me want to go and keep going, keep maintenance.
The big hurdle is that you’re not an athlete anymore so you don’t have to keep getting better. Find a workout you like. If you can do it, you’re in shape. Reward yourself by getting good at that. The first time I swam a mile, it was brutal. Two weeks later, it was a breeze.
Q: What advice would you give to someone who is currently playing a sport or training for the military?
A: College level sports is a lot of fun. It’s a much higher level than high school and not many people get to do it. When you get to college, you get memories from college itself and memories from your sport. I highly recommend just trying. The first day at try outs I was just looking for a relief from academics. I was scared, but you don’t know unless you try. Give it a shot. What do you have to lose? If you make the team, there’s your fraternity. You don’t have to join a fraternity if you have sport. You get to hang out, do your stuff together, make friends, and there’s no crazy initiation stuff. Your initiation is practice. They do initiations in fraternities because they have to have a common bond they all suffered through. In sports, you suffered through practice. You battle together and that is your bond. My advice is to just try! What are they going to do, cut you? You can at least give it a shot.
Q: Do you have anything else to add?
A: I was once an athlete, and I felt like being a SEAL I was still an athlete. You’re always an athlete. You’re always competing and timing yourself. Of course as a SEAL you’re kind of judged by how physical you are, how good and fast you are. When you swim, run, do PT, I wanted to win it all. I gained a lot of respect as a young officer Ensign because I was able to out run and out shoot others. I was successful because I had a good body and a right mind.
If you have any more questions for Dave, please leave comments below or contact me. If you or someone you know is struggling, please call the Suicide Hotline. It’s toll free and available 24/7 at 800-273-8255.
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