For Oden, boarding school worth it

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• By Jennifer Godwin
• 6:59AM on October 17th, 2008

Also continuing from Friday’s column, offensive tackle Anthony Oden, 6-8, 319, 4.87 of Hargrave Military Academy talks about the competition he and his teammates face.

“We play against college teams, we don’t play prep schools,” he said. “We’ve only played one game against a prep school. We play colleges’ second teams.”

Hargrave is 7-0 so far this season, defeating such teams as Navy, Averett, Robert Morris, Radford, East Carolina, Marshall. They still have four games remaining including George Mason and Tennessee.
Life at Hargrave is very strict but Oden sees himself benefiting from his experience at the boarding school.
“The coaches tell us being at a military school,” Oden said. “We have to look at this being our redshirt year. By the time we leave here, we’ll be prepared to go to college and play and adapt quicker than all the other freshmen.  That’s because of the structure; we have to be places at certain times, we have to get up at certain times. We have to do everything at certain times. This is preparing us for college more than anything else.”

Oden described a typical first part of his day at Hargrave.

“We have to wake up every morning at 5:45,” he said. “We have to get into formation, we lined up outside at 6 o’clock in the morning and march to breakfast. After we eat breakfast we have to come up stairs and clean up and then we go back into formation and march to class. It’s pretty hard.”

Each ends at 10 p.m. when the lights are turned off.

“I’ll be prepared for everything,” Oden said. “I’ll be strict on what time I need to study. It’s going to make me a better person.”