Horizon League

Life in the League: Duke Benge

December 07

Kobe Mosley

After what felt like a lifetime of hard work, dedication, and sacrifice all wrapped into four years, Duke Benge had finally done it. It was time to graduate from the Air Force Academy. Standing at the front of his dorm group, Squadron 27, he waited for his name to be called.

“Wyatt Duke Irvin Benge.”

Dressed in his navy shell jacket, gold sash, white trousers, and white peaked hat, Benge received his diploma and made his way across the stage at Falcon Stadium — home of the Air Force football team in El Paso County, Colorado. Waiting to greet him at center stage was President Joe Biden. A salute, handshake, congratulations, and thanks were exchanged between the cadet and the Commander-in-Chief before Benge made his way off the stage. 

Once his foot touched back down onto the turf grass, he was officially a second lieutenant. Looking back on the May graduation before a baseball practice in mid-November, a humble Benge still recounts getting to meet the president as “pretty cool.”
 

Nowadays, what constitutes a normal schedule has changed for the graduate transfer, who is enrolled in the sports management program at Wright State University and is a pitcher on the baseball team.

“The lifestyle change from Wright State versus the Air Force Academy is completely different,” Benge said, emphasizing the “completely different” part. 

During the fall semester, the two graduate classes he takes meet on Wednesday and Thursday nights. Outside of his practices and training with the baseball team, those are the only obligations he has on campus.

At the Air Force Academy, Benge had a much more compact schedule. He would have to wake up before 6 a.m., which was when military training started. Class time ran from 7 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., followed by military formation and a march to a 15-minute lunch. An hour of officer development, anywhere between three to five hours of baseball practice, and sometimes even more military training took up the late afternoon and evening. Homework would be the last thing that Benge and the other cadets did until midnight, and then they would “lather, rinse, and repeat” the same process again in the morning.
 

“It’s definitely been a change of pace being here,” Benge said with a smile.

The second lieutenant still keeps himself busy though, because when he’s not in the classroom or on the baseball field at Wright State, he’s making the six-minute drive to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — one of the largest air bases in the world. 

Because of how well Benge did academically at the Air Force Academy as well as his 97th percentile score on the GRE, he was stationed at Wright-Patterson and accepted into a merit-based program for pilot trainees. Since there are so many trainees in the Air Force and only a select number of actual pilots, Benge is also obtaining a master’s degree in operational logistics on the base while he waits for a slot to open up. In this program, Benge is learning the basics of flight and how to become a better officer and leader in the Air Force.

If you’re thinking “Wow, that’s a lot!”, you aren’t the only one.

“When I told my mom that I was going to do this —  do baseball and master’s classes at Wright State and do master’s classes and the leadership stuff that I'm doing on base — she was like, ‘You're crazy, you should not be doing this much stuff,’” Benge said.

“And I was like, ‘No, you only get one chance to live life.’ You don't want to just throw away this opportunity that you're given. The fact that it's a six-minute drive for me to get from where I work on base to (Wright State), that's something that's ordained by God. That's something that I'm incredibly blessed and incredibly fortunate to have. I really believe that everything happens for a reason and I am very happy to be here.”

Of course, Benge’s mom, Suzy, just wanted what was best for her son. Herself and the rest of his family have been major components in his journey, starting back in his hometown of Lakeville, Minnesota.

Growing up, Benge’s two older brothers Luke and Matt played baseball and football. Seeing how hard they worked instilled a similar work ethic in him when he began his baseball career.

“They really pushed me and I always remember growing up and seeing them working so hard … I wanted to be like them,” Benge said. “So it really was a conducive environment to success because I was always being pushed by seeing their work ethic.”

Benge spent a lot of time in pitching cages and weight rooms since it got cold so quickly in Minnesota. Having so much time to prepare for the season and hone his craft so he could put his best on the mound against someone else’s best at the plate is what made him fall in love with the sport.

“I guess that's where the competitiveness of sports really took over in my heart because I see it as something that isn't just about the game,” Benge said. “It's about the lessons that you learn from the game and the work ethic that you have to have.”
 

Benge’s father, Scott, was a graduate of the Air Force Academy in 1983 and inspired his son to follow in his footsteps. With what Benge calls “one of the hardest decisions of his life” in choosing to go to West Point, the Naval Academy, or the Air Force Academy for college, he eventually chose the Air Force route. Part of the reasoning behind choosing the Air Force Academy was being able to play on the baseball team, something Scott was all for.

“He follows it incredibly closely,” Benge said. “He knows all of my stats from the first pitch that I threw in college baseball … he knows the first strikeout that I got was against Maui Ahuna, who got drafted this last year out of Tennessee. He cares so much.”

Whenever things seem to all be piling up at once and Benge is struggling with the moment, he relies on his mom.

“There's days where it's like, I'll have an exam, I'll have a paper to write, I'll have a couple hours of practice, and then I'll have hours of homework and I'm having a hard time even to find time to sleep,” Benge said. “I’ll have a phone call with my mom for like 20 minutes and it's like, “I can do this, I can easily do this. So she really believes in me a lot, even when there's times that I don't believe in me.”

Benge’s sister, Ellie, also gives him a better perspective on things. Ellie is currently an Air Force ROTC cadet at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

“The trials that she's going through now as a cadet there are similar to the trials that I went through when I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy,” Benge said. “And it gives me a deep appreciation of the hard work that I put in then. She's awesome … I really try to work as hard as her.

Just like he is grateful for the position he is in today, Benge is grateful for his family that helped get here.

“I'm very, very blessed to have a family that genuinely cares about me and genuinely wants me to succeed.”
 

Benge feels there is no better position for him to succeed, especially in baseball, than with the Wright State baseball program. The opportunity came about when a former coach connected him with Raiders head coach Alex Sogard. Besides the exceptional facilities and years of success that the program has been able to sustain over the years, what sold Benge was the mindset of his teammates and how they “live at the field.”

“That is awesome and incredibly rare to do in today's age because there's so many things that distract us away from sports and so many things that pull us away from the game,” Benge said.

“Everybody on this team is very hungry, and very motivated to do well. Everybody wants to push each other and everyone wants to see each other succeed. There's no sort of animosity amongst each other against what we're doing training-wise. It's always like, ‘How can I push the guy next to me? How can I get the guy next to me better?’ And it's a really family-based environment.”

It’s also pretty neat to see military aircraft casually flying every so often.

“While I'm at practice here, just throwing the ball or working on some new pitch design, there's a C-17 flying overhead, and it's like,’ I've been in the cockpit of that. I've done that,’” Benge said. “So that’s pretty cool.”

With the season starting in a few months, Benge is excited to get back to playing the sport he loves and making an impact on the field for his team. The impact he cares about making the most, however, has nothing to do with baseball. He wants to make an impact on his teammates and who they are as people, similar to what he hopes to do in the Air Force.

“What matters (to me) is the virtue formation that happens in the hearts and souls of all of these guys on the team,” Benge said.

“That's why I came back this year. I didn't have to play another year of college baseball, I could have given up — I'm working full-time on base and I'm doing a full-time master's program here at Wright State and I'm practicing and playing games here. It's a pretty busy schedule. But I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity that Coach Sogard has given me because I have the opportunity to make an impact on lives, and the best thing about making an impact on other lives is that those lives get to make an impact on you.”