Our son is an Army Cyber captain six years out of West Point currently serving with Cyber Joint Forces at Ft. Meade, MD.
As I always post, there is no chancing for a service academy due to the complexity of the nomination process; without one, USMA cannot offer you an appointment. You can peruse any of my similar responses to other candidates asking what they can do to enhance their candidacy, such as this one and this one, and any of my other posts on this subforum.
You are currently doing well in two of the most important categories, sports and academics:
Keep it up, earn varsity letters in your sports, and rise to team captain in at least one of them.
Toward the end of your junior year/start of senior year, your focus will be on applying for a nomination from all sources available to you. Everything you could want to know about nominations you can find on your senators’ and congresspersons’ websites along with the Nominations subforum of serviceacademyforums.com (the equivalent of CC for those pursuing service academy appointments). I suggest you create an account on that site to get any further questions answered by current and former military officers, parents, and cadets.
You are on the right path, but now is the time to deeply consider your answers to the most important questions you will be asked by both the nomination panels and the academy:
- Why do you want to serve your country as an officer in our armed forces?
- Why are you choosing USMA as your path to a commission as opposed to ROTC or OCS or other academies? (Are you considering these alternate sources?)
- How deep is your commitment to service?
They will not care about what anyone else in your family has done. They want to know only why YOU want to serve and what your understanding of and commitment to service mean. And, they will want to know that this is your choice, not something you’re doing for anyone else or to satisfy anyone else’s expectations other than your own.
I am happy to answer any questions I can either on this thread or via PM, but as you face the many moving parts of the application to a service academy, you will also want the benefit of the experience of those on the service academy site I linked above.
Good luck!