STARRS Vice President and General Counsel Mike Rose is interviewed in this article. He wrote the 10 page paper which caused this positive result.
By Mary Shinn and O’Dell Isaac | Colorado Springs News Gazette
Nine former senior Air Force Academy soccer players graduated Tuesday after serving almost a year of probation following two incidents during fall 2024.
The newly minted second lieutenants received their commissions Monday night at Hotel Polaris, surrounded by about 100 family members, friends and supporters who packed a room on the first floor and filled it with cheers and pride.
“We are proud of our kids for weathering this,” said Mark Stoup, the father of one of the new graduates. “But there’s also a sour taste for a lot of us.”
The commission ceremony was one of four events over two days to celebrate the small group of young officers. At a luncheon on Monday, also at the hotel, Dan Clark, a member of the academy’s Board of Visitors and a professional speaker, said he emphasized the gravity of the moment.
“Their graduation is just as important as anybody else who has walked,” he said in an interview. The graduation ceremony itself was not open to the media.
The academy provided a written statement in response to a request to attend the graduation.
“After fulfilling all probation requirements, these cadets have been returned to good standing,” the statement said, in part.
The new officers have been waiting to graduate since last May and have faced punishment and a lack of due process that highlight a need for broader reform, their lawyer, Mike Rose, said in a letter to the Board of Visitors. The board includes members of Congress and provides recommendations for change to the secretary of Defense. But it is not a governing body.
In January, the Board of Visitors called for a formal review of the academy’s due process system in an official report and referenced the soccer players’ experience as problematic.
“The due process afforded to these cadets was anemic at best,” the board said in its January report.
Clark said the board is interested in ensuring due process is granted to cadets.
“We learned an awfully important lesson from this. … Let’s not let it happen again,” he said.
The board’s advocacy, which reached the highest levels of the Air Force, resulted in the cadets graduating two months early, Rose said.
The seniors faced punishment after incidents in a locker room and a hotel room that they took no action to stop, but did not participate in, Rose said in his letter. The Gazette reported earlier that the cadets dogpiled while in the locker room. The details of what happened in the hotel room have not been reported. The academy described the activities broadly as “physical, unprofessional, and demeaning misconduct” in a military transparency bulletin.
The bulletin also touched on the expectations for upperclassmen.
“Upperclassmen are responsible for mentoring underclassmen and for safeguarding the morale, physical well-being, and general welfare of those under their charge,” the bulletin said.
However, Rose argued in his letter that as freshmen, the new graduates were subjected to the same practices at the same times after their first practice and first away games, and the coaches led them to believe the practices were “approved and expected,” according to Rose’s letter.
A cadet’s father, who is also a retired Air Force colonel, also complained to the soccer team coaches that the culture and practices needed to change before the incidents. But nothing changed, according to the letter.
The soccer coach has since been replaced, Superintendent Tony Bauernfeind said during a December Board of Visitors meeting.
Hazing freshmen has been an ongoing problem at the academy, according to a 2023 Department of Defense Report. It called for abandoning a structure that did not acknowledge freshmen as full members of the cadet wing. Bauernfeind led a restructuring of cadet leadership practices starting in 2024 that taught cadets to be front-line supervisors, then team leaders, and then unit leaders.
He promised cadets the environment would be challenging, but not demeaning.
A drip-drip-drip of punishment
The senior soccer players faced a rolling series of punishments that made their future continuously unclear, Rose said.
In April 2025, the group received letters from academy leadership saying they had observed “disgraceful” behavior among teammates and failed to stop them, Rose’s 10-page letter said. The group had three days to respond. At the time, none had defense attorneys, and the academy did not have enough attorneys available to advise them. The cadets also did not receive hearings to respond to the allegations.
Three days before graduation in May, the seniors learned they would need to complete six months of probation, and their graduation was still in question. In June, the academy informed the cadets that they were recommended for disenrollment.
In July, they were informed they would not be disenrolled if they completed 10 months of probation.
They have largely been restricted from leaving, driving or using recreational facilities on campus. The group was also made to march 100 tours, among other formal punishments, such as reading, journaling and completing menial tasks for intramural sports. They were also supposed to engage in and report unspecified additional work as part of their personal growth, the letter said.
The students also took undergraduate-level classes despite the fact that they had met all the academic requirements for graduation, rendering these new courses “meaningless,” according to Stoup, the father of one of the former players.
The former student-athletes were suspended in a kind of limbo, students but not-students, graduates but not-graduates, walking the academy campus with “Class of 2025” on their uniforms while the rest of that cohort had moved on to start their Air Force careers.
“It was grossly excessive. It was overkill and it was counterproductive,” Rose said in an interview.
In one case, a cadet did not attend the August meeting of the team where the dogpile took place and in that way expressed his disapproval of the activity, Rose’s letter said. He received the same punishments anyway, the letter said.
Only one of the soccer players involved in incidents has been disenrolled, following additional misconduct, according to an academy military justice transparency bulletin.
Rose’s letter highlighted several problems with the due process granted the cadets, including a lack of time to respond to accusations and lack of an open hearing, where they could respond to the allegations against them.
A recent review by the Government Accountability Office found the Air Force Academy was the only one of the five service academies that did not provide consistent open hearings for those facing conduct violations.
Future for new officers
During a Board of Visitors meeting in December, Bauernfeind said he expected five of the seniors to become pilots, two to serve as developmental engineers and two to be commissioned into the Space Force.
“All are excited to start their journeys in the Air Force and Space Force,” he said.
He said the younger cadets were progressing well through their requirements and those who were freshmen at the time of the incident are also doing well.
He added that new soccer coach Greg Dalby has brought a new culture and focus to the men’s team.
For their part, the cadets and their families now vacillate between the instinct to rail against a punishment they feel was excessive, and the desire to turn the page on this chapter of their lives and start anew.
For the new graduates, there was no jumping into the Air Gardens fountains, no flyover from the Air Force Thunderbirds, and no crowd cheering from the Falcon Stadium bleachers. But they are now Air Force Academy graduates and second lieutenants, and that may have to be enough, Stoup said.
“There’s a lot of relief, but also some anger,” he said. “But our message to our kids, right now, is that they can either dwell on what has happened, or focus on the future. We are choosing to focus on the future.”
First published on Colorado Springs News Gazette
Read the memo:
Case Study of USAFA’s Due Process Failures and Punitive Overkill: A Path to Reformation
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