A team of cadets from Lehigh’s Steel Battalion took home first place out of 45 teams in the 2nd Freedom Brigade as part of the 2022 Ranger Challenge in October at Fort Dix Army Base.
The team’s first-place finish qualifies them to compete at the national level at the Sandhurst Military Skills Competition 2023, which will be held at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, in the spring. This is the third time the Steel Battalion has won the competition, as they took home first place in 2019 and 2020.
The team completed a high-speed Army Combat Fitness Test, a round-robin of events including land navigation, grenades, weapons assembly, rope bridge, tactical combat casualty care and tug of war. The event concluded with a six-mile tactical road march.
Christian Antry ’23 has competed in the Ranger Challenge all four years of his college career and is the only cadet in Lehigh’s program to win the competition three times in four years. This year, he served as the team’s captain.
He said he largely credits the team’s success to each member’s mental toughness and their ability to show up for each other.
"Our success was very much the product of ensuring that everybody believes that greatness isn't something that you strive to achieve, greatness is truly within, and you have to each and every day find greatness within you," Antry said. "The people on this team, the people to everybody's left and right, they all want to be great."