National Collegiate Athletic Association

Veterans Day 2011

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P.J. Byers, Penn State football

Resilience in Navy prepped him for Nittany Lions

By Michelle Hiskey
For NCAA.org

P.J. Byers matured by joining the U.S. Navy and becoming a dive specialist. He developed the confidence to walk on as fullback for Penn State. Now he’s on his way to becoming a Navy officer, with possibly at stop in the NFL.

The Navy instilled in him that survival depended on teamwork, and that habit carries over today to the gridiron. 

“Everyone is relying on me to do my job,” he said. “There’s no one else who can do it. A diver is a job that a lot of people don’t want to do, and that’s where I want to step up. I want to do the job no one wants to do.”

That gung-ho attitude and loyalty earned him a spot on the storied Penn State football team, where he plays fullback – the go-to guy for the 2-yard gain.

“I don’t think of myself as a veteran, because I’m still in the military,” said Byers, 26, an officer candidate who is in the Navy ROTC program on his campus.

“But last year, a good number of players shook my hand on Veterans Day and said ‘thank you.’ That hit me hard, because I didn’t even think players think about that.”

Byers enlisted to become a Navy SEAL, but his eyesight was not sharp enough for that elite group. He bounced back as a dive specialist, doing underwater submarine repairs and demolition of explosives at the Pearl Harbor Naval Station.

While training dolphins to find mines in San Diego, he played football in military leagues, and started hearing from college coaches.

A ROTC scholarship gave him his pick of colleges, and as a Pennsylvania native, Byers chose the Nittany Lions.

“The military was definitely an opportunity to mature,” Byers said. “People had told me that I had the talent to play football, but had a lack of confidence in myself. Coaches will tell you that you’re not good enough, and that gets engrained in your head if you aren’t mature enough to take it. In the Navy, it hit me that those coaches are just wrong.”

Close calls while underwater taught him to think calmly under pressure.

“It’s not exactly safe to be working on ships underwater,” he said. “We always have a surface supply of air for breathing. I remember one time going down 20 or 30 feet, and someone forgot to turn my air on. I was down there breathing nothing. Nothing crazy or serious happened, but I yelled at them.”

Though State College is a landlocked campus, and Byers has yet to work out in the Penn State pool, he stays close to the Navy and other troops online.

“Being a diver, I know people who are stationed all across the world,” Byers said. “People I don’t even know are rooting for me in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said. “I get friend requests on Facebook that say, ‘I’m in the Army. Good job!’ It’s great.” 

Michelle Hiskey is a freelance writer and a former golf student-athlete at Duke.