While some will be sleeping or frustrated with Baton Rouge traffic early Friday morning, the University’s ROTC students will be awake and running down the levee with their Texas A&M counterparts.
Because this weekend is the first football game between LSU and Texas A&M since the Aggie’s induction into the Southeastern Conference in July 2012, the ROTC programs have come together for a friendly competition.
But associate professor of military science Maj. Jason Mangiaracina said there has been an ongoing rivalry between the schools for decades.
“There’s a debate about who produced the most officers in World War II,” Mangiaracina said. “The other two largest producers in the country were West Point and Annapolis. Each school says something different.”
Before last year’s game, the University cadets traveled to Texas A&M’s campus in College Station, Texas and competed in a series of racing and shooting events.
The event was also scheduled for this week as a part of Ole War Skule Week, honoring the University’s history as a military academy, said ecology management senior Cadet Col. Sheena Poole.
The programs are trying to make it an annual event, Mangiaracina said.
The Texas A&M cadets will stay in the state police barracks on Thursday night. If weather permits, Louisiana National Guard helicopters will pick them up and fly them to the University soccer fields.
The first event in the three-part competition is a rock march. Participants will be in teams of 10 cadets, who must carry a 35 pound sacks of rocks along the levee, from the flagpole to the USS Kidd.
From there, they will be brought back to the University Lakes for a race, where participants will use paddle boats to navigate around buoys placed in the lakes.
The final event will be a stress shoot, which Mangiaracina explained as a shooting competition where participants have a limited number of weapons and time to engage with paper targets. They will be scored on accuracy.
“This is a chance for two excellent military organizations to compete as equals in an environment that fosters a closer relationship between rival schools,” Poole said.
“This is a chance for two excellent military organizations to compete as equals in an environment that fosters a closer relationship between rival schools.”