Cadet Sponsors Provide Time Well Spent

Cadet Basic Training (CBT) is stressful enough on its own, but in the summer of 2020 new cadets had to endure Beast Barracks with the added stressor of COVID-19. “I remember lying in bed on that first night thinking, ‘If this is what being an officer is like, I don’t know if I can do five years,’” Knights says. He found that he missed his parents a lot, even though he told them and himself before CBT that he wouldn’t. As it turned out, by the end of Beast, Knights learned that he now had a second family. True, his companymates and classmates have become family to him, but at the conclusion of CBT Knights also met his Fourth Class Sponsor family: Chaplain (Major) Jay Hudson, his wife and their three kids, who have volunteered their home to assist Knights and five other plebes in their development by exposing them to Army traditions, customs, and courtesies, as well as helping them realize that the Army lifestyle involves a family environment not all that different from what they knew as civilians just a few months earlier. Full story.