Dan Keeler: From Notre Dame High to Navy commander | College News
For all the push-ups accomplished, for all the operating drills endured and for all the yelling obtained during his days enjoying high faculty soccer at Sherman Oaks Notre Dame High in the Nineteen Nineties, Dan Keeler is getting the final giggle later this month when he takes command of the Nimitz-class plane provider USS Abraham Lincoln in Coronado.
“Now I’m going to have to salute him,” former Notre Dame coach Kevin Rooney quipped.
Keeler, who graduated from high faculty in 1994 and went on to the Naval Academy, is taking command of one of the Navy’s most distinguished ships.
The USS Abraham Lincoln arrives San Diego in 2020.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda / San Diego Union-Tribune)
“It is incredible that he has earned this responsibility,” Rooney stated.
Keeler was a defensive back and observe athlete for the Knights and is one of 5 siblings who attended Notre Dame. Track coach Joe McNab, who just gained his eleventh Southern Section championship, was his defensive backs coach.
“Good kid,” McNab stated.
“He’s a guy who fit all the boxes in terms of being a great kid and doing things right,” Rooney stated.
Rooney, McNab and former soccer assistant Jeff Kraemer will make the journey to the San Diego space for the change-of-command ceremony. For some cause, Keeler invited his former high faculty coaches after all those days of sweat and tears in Sherman Oaks.
“If I had known he was going to be so powerful, I wouldn’t have made him run so much,” Kraemer stated.
Keeler isn’t the first Notre Dame graduate to rise in the Navy ranks. Retired Adm. Mike Mullen was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011 and graduated from Notre Dame in 1964. Mullen once got here back to his alma mater to handle the scholar physique.
Rooney, who retired in 2019 after 40 years as soccer coach, stated his aim was all the time to “help kids become great people and do things right.”
Coaches know that the best day of all is when a graduate comes back to campus and tells them how they’re doing and explains how classes discovered as youngsters actually made a distinction in their life.
As summer season begins and graduates transfer on with their lives and the category of 2029 arrives, it’s a good reminder to everybody that it’s not wins and losses that matter most in high faculty. It’s instructing life classes and getting ready college students to develop into adults, good people and good group members.
To see a former Los Angeles-area high faculty soccer participant take charge of an plane provider is proof that all that operating to gain stamina, all that preaching to work collectively as a group, all those lectures that apply makes good … it’s true.
You only need to hear, be taught and dedicate your self to reaching a aim.
A salute to all the coaches and lecturers who perceive their actual job is to create alternatives for their college students to succeed through knowledge and inspiration.
Capt. Keeler, Bravo Zulu and Anchors Aweigh. Be secure.
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