How Butler grad Brett Brady channeled intense focus into NCAA running career, future as Navy pilot
Brett Brady enjoys a challenge. He likes to push himself.
He’s one of the best distance runners to come out of Butler High School in the past decade and has competed in SEC championships in cross country and track and field and a NCAA Track and Field Regional. He enrolled at the Naval Academy to run and train to be a fighter pilot, and he’s finishing up his master’s degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Tennessee this summer.
Distance running and training to be a fighter pilot require rigorous internal motivation. Few are cut out to be elite at both.
Brady might be one of the few.
“I think that’s very appropriate for pilots because it’s very intense, long hours of studying, and it’s very easy to take a night off, or a week off or a month off and be checked out,” Brady said Saturday after running the fastest male time in the Butler Road Race 5-mile. “And with our sport and with that, that can’t happen.”
He said the Naval Academy cross country team is a “factory for pilots.” The team consists of a handful of students in the marines or training to work on a submarine, and the rest are aspiring pilots.
“I think if you talk to a lot of people in the Navy, they’ll say fighter pilots are very intense and take what they do very seriously, but they also know how to enjoy it,” Brady said when asked about the mental makeup of doing both. “And I think that’s very appropriate for running. It takes a special kind of kid to run in this (heat), run at 1 o’clock in the afternoon and it’s hot, keep running around the track aimlessly — it's just a lot.”
Brady was back in his hometown for just a few days, he said, to run the Butler Road Race and catch up with some family and his former coaches. He grabbed lunch with retiring Butler distance coach Rick Davanzati. Brady laughed over memories from his high school days with his former coach and put in a hard practice Friday.
Brady will wrap up his master’s in August — finishing a two-year program in just 14 months — before heading to Pensacola, Florida, for flight school.
He went to Tennessee as part of an Academy’s Officer Scholarship Program that allows select midshipmen and midshipwomen to get their master’s from civilian institutions. UT presented Brady “the best blend” of challenging academics to prepare himself for flight school and a strong distance running program.
He made the NCAA East Regional championships a year ago in the 3,000-meter steeplechase while competing with Navy but missed it this spring by a second while with the Volunteers.
Since then, he ran some World Athletics steeplechase events in Nashville and Portland, Oregon, and is hoping to enter the USA Track and Field 8K Championships in Tennessee before winding down his season.
Then Brady hopes to “fly some jets” in flight school and keep running and competing as often as he can.
“That’s what I would like, but anyone who knows anything about the pipeline is you never know until the day,” he said. “From the experiences I’ve had, I know I’m gonna have a good time flying anything in the Navy."
