Friday is graduation day at the Coast Guard Training Academy at Yorktown. The campus lining the York River graduates more than 12,000 students a year.
Students march onto the main green until the quad is full, while families wait off to the side. This is their follow-on training after bootcamp. Though unlike the other services, members of the Coast Guard typically go straight into the fleet and may not go back to school for as long as two years after graduating from bootcamp. But they can’t move up in rank without finishing a course at one of the schools, like Yorktown.
Yorktown teaches the two of the Coast Guard’s largest job classifications, called rates. Boatswines Mates drive their boats and ships, while Machinist Technicians, which perform most of the basic repairs on board ships, said Capt. Scott Rae, commanding officer Training Academy Yorktown.
He estimates 25 percent of the Coast Guard has been through one of their programs. The Coast Guard was in a recruiting crisis less than three years ago.
“Ten years ago, there was a long waiting line to get in the Coast Guard, and then there was none, and then now we're back to a longer period of time for people to get in the Coast Guard,” Rae said.
Now Yorktown, with its 1,100 beds, is at capacity and the service is looking at ways to add space for more students, he said.
“I've never seen the growth in the Coast Guard like what’s happening now, in my more than three decades,” Rae said.
He said the Coast Guard restructured recruiting, opening up more recruiting offices and allowed top performers to stay in recruiting their entire tenure, if they wanted to keep bringing in new cadets.
Last year, the service set an ambitious goal to add another 15,000 new recruits to the Coast Guard by fiscal 2028, which would require expanding bootcamp, Rae said
He said it is feasible, “over time, not all at one time, and there's been very deliberate planning to see how we phase that in, and where we can take it one step at a time, if you will, or take it in chunks.”
Yorktown is the oldest and the largest of the eight Coast Guard training centers. It opened in 1959. Its course offerings have shifted over the years. It was home to Officers Candidate School until it moved to the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn. in 1998. Other programs shift again. In June, the Coast Guard announced that the service purchased Birmingham-Southern College in Alabama. The service is deciding what it will teach at the new location, Rae said.
Yorktown is also the Coast Guard’s main training center for Gunner’s Mates. They train with small arms and a massive deck gun which is set between two floors.
At the pool, students simulate jumping overboard and treading water. A few buildings away, the Damage Control Simulator looks like the well of a ship. An instructor opened a valve and water spurted out of a broken pipe and holes in the side of the hull, including a series of bullet holes. Students used pounded wooden wedges into the gaps with sledge hammers to plug larger gaps, while another student sealed a pipe with a metal patch. The deck was filled with knee-deep water by the time the simulation was over.
“They come in here. They'll spend three to four days inside of this trainer, just learning the basics. They're not going to be masters when they leave here, but they are going to have a good understanding of what their responsibilities are when they head out to the fleet,” said Senior Chief Stephen Brochu.
