When he was a young lineman playing football in elementary school, Bernie Sarra was an unusually big kid who quickly grew to enjoy the violent collisions that marked his favorite game.

Watching Sarra these days toiling in the trenches with the Navy defensive line is essentially watching that same guy that used to inflict and absorb punishment on the Pop Warner fields in Western Pennsylvania.

Sarra, who anchors Navy's 3-4 defense as a senior co-captain and third-year starter at nose guard, has come far as a Midshipman. With his obsessive attention to detail, evidenced by his reformed diet, his devotion to proper rest and recovery methods and his never-ending quest for the perfect gap technique as Navy's critical man in the middle, Sarra is a source of inspiration among his teammates.

"Bernie is a true perfectionist," Navy senior defensive end Will Anthony says. "I watch the way he goes about his business in practice, and I feel like he's the kid every freshman should look up to. I look at the way he's always making sure he finishes his swim moves and his rips and bull rushes the right way.

"I realize I'm competing with a standard that Bernie has set on our defensive line," Anthony adds. "He plays every down at practice like he's in a game. He only goes at one speed. He's always low in a good stance. His hands are always on the inside [of his opposing blocker] where they belong. I feel he's the most consistent player I've ever seen."

Keenan Reynolds, Navy's senior quarterback who splits team captain duties with Sarra, echoes Anthony with more examples of Sarra's exceptional drive. Such as the time earlier this summer, when players were conducting pre-camp workouts and Reynolds encountered Sarra lifting large amounts of weights as the strongest man on the Navy roster - on a day when defensive linemen were off.

Another snapshot from Sarra's sophomore season lingers vividly in Reynolds' memory. Sarra had recently suffered a broken ankle in a loss to Notre Dame (the only significant injury Sarra has endured at Navy).

Although the injury forced him to miss three games, Sarra was on course to return against Army and was attending practice, while wearing a protective boot while sitting on a scooter. And Sarra was not being a passive observer.

"Most guys in that position would just be hanging out at practice watching. But Bernie is on that scooter by the [blocking] dummies, and he's jamming a dummy, over and over," said Reynolds, thrusting his hands forward to illustrate. "He can't even use the lower half of his body, but he's still trying to get better by keeping his hands and upper body sharp. I think sums up why he's our [other] captain."

When you discuss the rigors of playing nose guard with the 6-feet-1, 297-pound Sarra, who bench presses 500 pounds and whom head coach Ken Niumatalolo calls the best Midshipman to play that position since he took over the program in 2007, you hear about more than the inevitable pain resulting from constant mashing of big bodies inherent in Sarra's line of work.

When Sarra talks about his role in Navy's defense - which ranked in the nation's top 40 in 2014 in red-zone efficiency, interceptions and passing yards allowed - he provides a glimpse of the science lurking beneath the surface of a nasty job.

"Whether you're playing offense or defense, playing on the line comes down to the same things," Sarra said. "It's all about proper body positioning and using your hands the right way. If your hips aren't positioned the right way and your step is wrong and your hands aren't correct, it doesn't matter if you're a big guy and a good athlete. You've got to actually learn how to use your body."

Perhaps no one on Navy's roster is more in tune with his body than Sarra. Although he was good enough to appear in eight games as a freshman and thus earn a varsity letter - uncommon for plebes at Navy - Sarra got physically whipped too often by opposing centers. Even though he finished strong by making five tackles in a win over Army, Sarra knew some changes were in order.

He resolved to get quicker, stronger and more technically sound. Sarra also listened to his coaches' advice by making significant changes in his carefree diet. He lost nearly 50 pounds by his sophomore season. That year, the native of Monessen, Pa. - about 25 miles south of Pittsburgh - turned into an impact player for the Mids.

Sarra smiles as he recalls his old self, a guy who would down an entire pizza any time of the day or night without giving it a second thought. "There was no filter on how much I ate or when I ate it," he recalls.

The current Sarra tracks the carbs-to-fat ratio in his daily meals, as well as proper protein intake. It shows in the massive upper body that caps a nearly 300-pound frame that strikes an observer as somewhat trim for a huge, interior lineman. The current Sarra also is known to inhabit the ice tub more than most Navy players and is a stickler about never skipping treatments to ease the aches that pile up.

"It's a grueling job. You're engaged on every play, making contact," Sarra says. "The day after games, you feel like you've been in a car accident. You've got to give your body a chance to recover."

Sarra's strength, conditioning and weight control were so efficient in 2013 that, after he suffered a broken ankle against Notre Dame, Sarra bounced back a month later to anchor a Navy defense that closed out the year with two dominant showings. The Mids allowed just 13 points and one touchdown in lopsided wins over Army and Middle Tennessee State in the Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl.

Last year, Sarra emerged as a star on the Navy line, where he swallowed up a steady diet of double teams and allowed ends such as Anthony (team-high 11.5 tackle for loss) and linebackers such as Daniel Gonzales (three interceptions and second-high with 86 tackles) to shine.

In the season opener against Ohio State, which went on to win the national championship, Sarra and Anthony were twin nightmares for the Buckeyes' rushing attack. It stalled for nearly three quarters, before OSU manufactured enough big plays and capitalized on enough Navy mistakes to take a 34-17 victory that was deceptively challenging.

Sarra went on to start all 13 games. He finished with 38 tackles, a number that hardly quantifies the quality of his work. One statistic reveals much about Sarra's makeup. He led Division I by blocking three field goals.

"We've never had anybody do that before, and that's going back to the days when [defenders] were allowed to jump over [offensive linemen]," says Dale Pehrson, who has been an assistant at Navy for two decades and is doubling this year as interim defensive coordinator and defensive line coach.

"I think that [blocked field goals] number gives you an idea of how much Bernie understands football," Pehrson adds. "The peripheral stuff, the little details, those are really important to him."

"When you're an odd-front team like we are, your whole defense starts with your nose guard. Bernie embodies our defense," Niumatalolo says. "He's tough and disciplined, and he does a very unselfish job. People always notice when the linebacker makes the tackle. They don't usually notice players like Bernie that are controlling the gaps [between offensive linemen] and making plays happen for other people."

"A good nose guard can shut down a whole lot of plays, and I've seen it first-hand in practice," Reynolds adds. "Everybody on our offense will be in the right spot, but because Bernie is stalemating our center, we can only gain a yard. When we go up against a defense that doesn't have a good nose guard, we can really gash that defense."

No wonder Sarra stuck out this year among a list of solid candidates to lead the Navy defense as a co-captain and complement to Reynolds. Sarra touted other seniors such as Anthony, linebacker Myer Krah and defensive backs Quincy Adams and Kwazel Bertrand as worthy of the honor bestowed upon him by the players' vote.

"We've got unbelievable leaders across the board with our seniors," Sarra said. "The fact that the team thought I'd be capable of leading the defense is unbelievable. [Being voted co-captain] was probably one of the best moments of my life."

Like so many Navy players, Sarra comes from the land of the under-recruited, as Division I schools routinely passed on him, due to his lack of size at 6-1. Never mind that Sarra, a two-way lineman as a senior at Greensburg Central Catholic High School and mainly right guard before that, was a two-time, all-state performer who helped Greensburg finish as runner-up in the state playoffs with a 13-3 record in 2009.

"Bernie was always a big boy, big and thick. He understood at an early age that the game of football is not always fun. It hurts," recalls Bernie Sarra, Sr., his father, who is a business school instructor. "He also understood the easiest way to get hurt is to play scared. That didn't happen much with him. It wasn't unusual for Bernie to have six or seven pancake blocks a game in high school."

Long before he had become a force on the youth football field, Sarra also had overcome problems he inherited as an infant. Upon birth as a nine-pound, 22-inch baby, Sarra contracted a staph infection that required him to spend his first two weeks in a neonatal intensive care unit.

Within hours of going home, Sarra was back in the hospital again, where doctors determined he had been born with an underactive thyroid gland. He takes medication that produces the hormone the thyroid naturally makes.

"You would never have known he had those issues when you looked at him [as an older boy]," Bernie, Sr. says. "Bernie played basketball, baseball and soccer when he was little. He was always the strongest guy in the room. By his freshman year in high school, he was lifting [weights] five days a week. Football was the game he loved."

While Sarra was visiting various football camps as a high school player and drawing mainly looks from Division II and III programs, he ended up near Philadelphia at a camp run by Ty Warren's 1^st and Goal Foundation. There, Navy recruiters fell in love with what they saw.

"There were guys bigger and taller and more highly recruited than Bernie," Niumatalolo said. "But we thought, with his mobility and his pop coming off the ball, that he was the best player there."

Before long, Sarra was headed to the Naval Academy Prep School in Newport, R.I. By that point, the Navy coaching staff had already decided that, even though Sarra looked like a can't-miss prospect as an interior offensive lineman, he would provide much-needed help on defense.

The way senior guard E.K. Binns sees it, the coaches unquestionably made the right call.

"The transformation [Sarra] has made here, from being a big guy that plugs the holes to an explosive guy who can beat you with his hands, is great," Binns said. "Not many 300-pound guys can hit you with a bull rush then burn you with a speed rush.

"It's the details that separate the good players from the average players. Bernie is always taking mental reps. He's grabbing a drink of water and thinking about every little thing he's done wrong in the last drill. And I know personally that, when he lines up in front of you, you'd better not mess up one thing in your technique, or he will eat you alive."