ANNAPOLIS, Md.—Navy senior punter Riley Riethman has been named a semifinalist for the William V. Campbell Trophy, also known as the Academic Heisman, by the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame.
Celebrating its 35th year, the Campbell Trophy recognizes an individual as the absolute best football scholar-athlete in the nation for his combined academic success, football performance and exemplary leadership.
Riethman, arguably the best punter in school history, carries a 3.91 grade point average in aerospace engineering.
His 43.7 career punting average in the best in school history by 1.2 yards, he holds the single-season record of 44.8 set in 2023 and is second, third and fifth all time at Navy for single-game average.
Riethman is also extremely unselfish. This year he has his lowest punting average in his career through three games (40.4), mostly because he's been punting on short fields and has tried to pin the opponents deep in their territory instead of kicking it through the end zone. Seven of his 13 punts this year have pinned the opponents inside the 20 and he has just one touchback on the season.
This past summer, Riethman participated in summer training that saw him and six other Midshipmen immerse themselves in Nepalese culture. As the Logistics Officer he was responsible for travel planning for a 7,300 mile journey, helping build a travel itinerary for the three-week trekking adventure and interacting with a wide variety of people from the US Ambassador to Nepal to working with orphans in Kathmandu. Riethman led his peers through challenging hikes with over 3,000 feet of elevation gain per day, during the monsoon season, often covered in leeches.
Riethman is currently working on his capstone project by building a drone capable of withstanding arctic temperatures that has infrared sensors to detect polar bears and their dens. The point of the project is to increase road efficiency in the arctic because when they are building roads and run into a polar bear den, they must divert the road and it is very costly. This will allow them to identify where the bears are to plan ahead.
Last year, Riethman did wind tunnel testing that helped identify the best configuration for a football to fly in order to optimize height and distance for punting.
Two summers ago, Riethman did an internship at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California where he studied the effects of hypervelocity impacts on aerospace structures to simulate what a hypersonic missile could do to a plane or other missile.
