WEST POINT, N.Y. – As 48 teams competed for the top prize at the 2024 Sandhurst International Military Skills Competition on April 26 and 27, it came down to two teams fighting it out at the last event, The Crucible. When the dust settled from a hard-fought, exhausting last event, the U.S. Military Academy Black Team won the title by a whisker over the Royal Military College of Canada - Kingston by two points, 1,715 to 1,713.

Over the competition’s two days, the participants of Sandhurst came from 10 USMA company squads, USMA Black and Gold teams, 17 international teams representing 15 countries, 16 ROTC teams from across the nation and three other service academy teams.

Hosted by West Point since 1967, teams competed in a rigorous 36-hour course testing warrior spirit, cohesion and dedication to mission accomplishment. The winning team was chosen based on their collective point performance in 15 different events testing physical fitness, military skills, teamwork and leadership.

The events included Tactical Combat Casualty Care, a grenade assault course, zodiac movement, tactical communications, CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear), weapons assembly, functional fitness, M4 rifle and M17 pistol marksmanship, land navigation, obstacle course, call for fire and The Crucible.

The final results, and the teams that earned Sandhurst medallions for placing in the Top 5, were USMA Black (1,715 points), RMC Canada - Kingston (1,713), U.S. Air Force Academy (1,423), Texas A&M University (1,327) and USMA Company A-3 Anacondas (1,316). By taking the top spot, USMA Black earned the Cadet Reginald E. Johnson Memorial Award Saber Plaque.

The other award winners included RMC Canada - Kingston taking the Most Lethal Squad Marksmanship Award with the highest combined M4 rifle and M17 pistol marksmanship scores, USMA Black earning the Physical Endurance Award, Company A-3 Anacondas earning the U.S. Corps of Cadets Sandhurst Performance Award for the highest scoring U.S. Cadet Command team, RMC Canada - Kingston taking the International Cup for highest scoring international team, and Texas A&M earning the ROTC Cup as the highest scoring ROTC team in the competition.

Another award given out was for the best squad leader throughout the competition, the Tom Surdyke Leadership Award, was presented to Company A-3 squad leader and Class of 2024 Cadet Evan Symes.

The award honors Tom Surdyke who died in June 2016 trying to save a swimmer caught in a rip current off a Long Island beach. While he was a hero and saved the swimmer, he went under and didn’t survive.

“Winning the Tom Surdyke Leadership Award was a massive honor,” Symes stated. “Tom Surdyke is a model of what sacrifice and doing the right thing looks like, and I look up to him and his legacy. While it may seem obvious, I really could not have won this award without the help of my team.

“Seeing the hard work and dedication of my team every day at practice made me want to be a better leader for them,” he added. “I needed to be the best leader I could be because that’s what my team deserved.”

Symes explained that winning best company and securing a Top 5 finish was a surreal feeling.

“From long practices to diets to military studying on their own time, I asked a lot from our team,” Symes said. “So, to see it come to fruition meant a lot.”

The journey for Company A-3 began in the fall with only two members of the team, including Symes, who had ever competed in a Spring Sandhurst Competition. He had served as a squad leader for Company E-1 during his sophomore year. He took a year off from Sandhurst but came back in fall 2023 and began hosting tryouts and hit the ground running.

“Our goal from the beginning was to win the international Sandhurst competition,” Symes explained. “In the fall competition, we were the number one company team, beating Gold, and losing the tiebreaker to Black. This semester we ramped up our training in pursuit of our goal.

“Although we didn’t win, we gave 100%, both in the competition and the train-up,” he added. “We were the underdogs from the start as an inexperienced company team, but our hard work shone through to come out on top of a lot more experienced and better-funded teams.”

Symes, who will commission as an infantry officer upon graduation next month and serve with 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, upon his Basic Officer Leadership Course graduation, considered Sandhurst a grueling competition that sharpened his military skills and physical fitness.

“What I will take away the most from Sandhurst and into my military career is what it takes to be an elite team,” Symes said. “Company A-3 Sandhurst team became an elite team, ready for any task, and willing to push to the limits for each other. I hope to cultivate a similar culture within my platoon in the Army.”

Now that the competition is done and it is his last one at West Point, he considers it a bittersweet moment, but the bonds and memories from Sandhurst will last a lifetime.

“I still remember my first competition, freezing under a poncho while eating an MRE multigrain snack bread with my teammates,” Symes revealed. “In my third competition, I remember beating Gold in combatives and the pure joy that came with that win. This year, we had a grenade miss in The Crucible, a mistake on the claymore, and a couple of stomach issues, but we also flew through the Marne Obstacle Course, outshot Air Force, and excelled in weapons assembly disassembly.

“Every competition has its ups and downs, but I wouldn’t trade any of those experiences for the world,” he concluded. “I will forever remember this competition and I am very glad to share all of the bad and the good with such an amazing team.” 

Class of 2024 Cadet and squad leader for the USMA Black Team, Hollis Fitzgerald, said the emotion his team felt when they heard RMC Canada - Kingston called as the second-place team and his team announced first was extremely rewarding.

“Our team trains all year for Sandhurst,” Fitzgerald stated. “We demand excellence from our members every day. Being able to then challenge ourselves and our work from the year on an international stage is an incredible opportunity, but if our team was not called last, we wouldn’t be able to say our training was worth it.

“There’s a lot of pressure considering we only have the one competition to prove ourselves, so when we heard that we had won, we were all incredibly proud of each other, our dedication and our training throughout the year, which led us to victory,” he added.

Fitzgerald was accompanied by many Firsties on his squad, and this year turned out to be the highest performing team the group has ever been a part of.

“My team members are all very similar in a few traits: our work ethic, our commitment to excellence and our passion to win,” Fitzgerald explained. “We didn’t accept anything other than first place. If we did take first place, we considered it meeting the standard, celebrated the moment and then fairly quickly after we started discussing how we can get better for the next year. My teammates on Sandhurst embody the winning spirit and the work ethic it takes, which I believe every Army officer should have.”  

With the competition won by only two points, as the team prepared for The Crucible, the Sandhurst officer in charge, Marine Corps Maj. Conor Downs, briefed the squad leaders that The Crucible is going to decide who wins the competition.

From that standpoint, Fitzgerald knew his team’s performance on day two of the competition closed the point gap enough to where his squad was right below Canada.

“I told them that every individual lane wins the competition,” Fitzgerald exclaimed. “We didn’t change anything. We compete at each lane or each movement with the mindset that we must win that event in order to win the competition. We focused on one hole at a time, like the game of golf. For the Crucible, it was our final hole. We went into it with the mindset that we would give it everything we had.”

The future infantry officer who will be stationed in Vicenza, Italy, Fitzgerald said that Sandhurst has taught him many leadership lessons over the past four years.

“One lesson is that you can always push yourself a little harder and a litter further than you think you can,” Fitzgerald said. “A second is how important it is to stay calm when things don’t go your way, to have a short memory and forget any mistakes, and to show no fear or worry because that bleeds into those under you. For the competition, I continuously try to preach to our team how great we’re doing on each lane because I know that will only incite more excellence.”

What Fitzgerald will remember most from competing in Sandhurst are the memories made with his teammates.

“The celebrations after doing so well together along with the pain and silence that I know we all shared when we were climbing the Round Pond hill on the eight-mile ruck march,” Fitzgerald concluded. “The shared hardships are what will remain in my head the longest.”

To see more photos from the event, visit 2024 Sandhurst Military Skills Competition Day 1 | Flickr, Sandhurst Military Skills Competition Day 2 | Flickr and 2024 Sandhurst Military Skills Competition Award Ceremony | Flickr,