Coast Guard Athletics

Consider what USCGA cadet-athletes have done from 2023 to 2025. Michelle Kwafo ’23 won the 2023 NCAA DIII 100m national championship while setting a DIII record. That fall of the same year, Nicholas Reeser ’25 won the ICSA Open Singlehanded Championship.



Chase Randall ’25 became a two-time NCAA wrestling champion, winning in 2024 and 2025. Colin Twiss ’25 won the 2025 NCAA championship in the 200yd freestyle, and Allie Wildsmith ’26 took both the 2025 NCAA indoor and outdoor high jump national titles.



Track & field, sailing, wrestling, and swimming. Five cadet-athletes won seven national titles over three remarkable years. The greatest evidence of Coast Guard Athletics’ momentum may be how much history is being made right now.

Coast Guard Football junior Sean Burns and senior Harrison Hensley have been named NEWMAC Players to Watch for the 2026 season!

The most successful decade in Coast Guard Athletics history cannot be measured by championships alone. Since 2015, cadet-athletes have earned over 200 cadet athletes earned All-America and Academic All-District recognition.

Coast Guard Athletics has a proud history, and yet by virtually every measure, the past decade has been the most successful in Academy history. Since 2015, Coast Guard cadet-athletes have produced national champions in wrestling, swimming, track and field, and sailing, while producing more than 120 individual national qualifiers.



Across sports, Bears have accumulated approximately 200 All-America honors. The success has also been broad. Programs throughout the department have reached conference and national competition, while individual cadet-athletes have repeatedly ranked among the best in Division III and collegiate sailing.



This has not been one exceptional team or one exceptional season. It has been a decade of sustained, broad-based competitive excellence.

The first decade of the new century produced landmark achievements across Coast Guard Athletics. In 2000, Darby Schlaht ‘03 captured the NCAA Division III national championship in the 100-yard breaststroke.



Five years later, men’s basketball completed one of the greatest team seasons in Academy history, finishing 24–7, winning its second consecutive NEWMAC Tournament championship, and advancing to the NCAA Division III Elite Eight.



That same season, women’s basketball won a school-record 25 games and captured the ECAC New England championship. Different sports. Different measures of success. One increasingly competitive athletics program.

In 1976, the U.S Coast Guard Academy opened its doors to women. Athletics quickly became part of that historic transition, with women’s gymnastics becoming the Academy’s first official women’s intercollegiate team that same year.



Early opportunities also emerged soon after in women’s basketball, swimming, and track and field, as the Academy began building a broader foundation for female cadet-athletes to compete at the varsity level. 
It was the beginning of something much larger.



Over the next 50 years, women at CGA would become conference champions, All-Americans, national champions, captains, record setters, and leaders across a growing number of varsity programs.

Few seasons loom larger in Coast Guard Athletics history than 1963. Under legendary coach and athletic director Otto Graham, the Bears completed the only undefeated and untied regular season in Coast Guard football history.



Their reward was an invitation to the Tangerine Bowl, putting Coast Guard football on a national stage. Graham had already built one of professional football’s great careers before arriving in New London in 1959. At Coast Guard, he helped build something different: a program rooted in competition, discipline, and leadership.



More than six decades later, the 1963 Bears remain one of the defining teams in Academy history and an enduring example of what Coast Guard cadet-athletes could accomplish. Undefeated, untied, and unforgettable.

With 1️⃣1️⃣ days left until they open their season at No. 18 Brandeis on September 1st, Coast Guard Men’s Soccer has been ranked 3rd in the annual NEWMAC Preseason Coaches Poll!

During the 1979-80 academic year, women’s rowing was officially established alongside their male counterparts as a varsity sports team. In just four years, the program would reach the pinnacle of the intercollegiate rowing world.



The team put themselves on the map in Fall of 1984, when the varsity four placed fifth out of 40 boats at the prestigious Head of the Charles regatta. The 4V also took first place at the 1985 and 1987 New England Championships.



The four-year period of the still growing program is best remembered today for its unprecedented four consecutive small college national title wins at the Dad Vail Regatta. In 2022, their accomplishments were recognized with induction into the CGA Athletic Hall of Fame.

By the middle of the 20th century, Coast Guard Athletics had reached the national stage. In 1944, C. Mitchell Daniel (c/o 1945) and Arthur Fontaine (c/o 1945) became the Academy’s first ever national champions by capturing the ICSA Open Fleet Race Championship.



CGA captured additional sailing national championships in 1960, 1962, and 1966, establishing Coast Guard among the nation’s leading programs. The success ushered in the beginning of an extraordinary era for the Academy as a whole.



In 1969, Greg Magee (c/o 1969) won the national championship 120-yard high hurdles, extending CGA’s success beyond the water. The Academy was no longer simply participating in intercollegiate athletics. It was competing against the best in the nation, and winning.