This is your 6 a.m. wake up call. Anthony Sitter of Bowling Green has this to look forward to for the next four years. Sitter, a senior at Bowling Green High School, received an offer of appointment to attend the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD.

The news of an appointment brought relief to the 4.0 scholar athlete. “I don’t have to worry about the applications, scholarships, and working during college I mean this will be it,” Sitter said. According to the Princeton Review, the U.S. Navel Academy is the eighth hardest school to get into out of 338 schools on the list. Sitter’s ACT scores ranked him in the middle half of the students attending the academy, but when comparing this to BGSU students, he would be ranked in the top one-tenth of the student body.

Congressman Paul Gillmor, R-Old Fort, nominated Sitter for the Naval Academy, along with 27 other students across Ohio for all four of the U.S. service academies. “I am very pleased that Anthony has been offered an appointment for admission to the United States Naval Academy,” Gillmor said. “He is certainly an outstanding student, a gifted student-athlete, and a fine young man. I am sure he will do very well in all his future endeavors.” Sitter also received the Senate nomination.

At Bowling Green High School, Sitter earned a National Merit Award in science and qualified for state competition in the Greater Toledo Council of Teachers and Mathematics test.

Besides academics, Sitter excels in swimming. His best event was the 200-meter freestyle, but he qualified for the state championship in the 400-meter relay this year in Canton, Ohio. He lettered his junior year and won many scholar athlete awards. He has been swimming since the age of 12.

Having lived in Bowling Green all of his life, Sitter faces the challenge of traveling to Maryland for school. “I will not be looking forward to being away from home because I won’t be able to come home very often,” he said. “I will be leaving all of my friends, but this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”

Sitter didn’t attend public school until his freshman year in high school. He was home-schooled full-time through the eighth grade. He went to the high school part-time until his junior year. “My husband and I decided to home school him because my husband is a real estate agent and worked weekends and nights, so we wanted family time in the middle of the day and week; therefore, we wanted school to work around family time,” Diane Sitter, Anthony’s mother, said. Sitter was pulled out of home schooling so he could join the high school swim team. In order to participate in athletics, Sitter must take at least one course at the high school. This year, he attends BGHS four periods of the day and BGSU for the English 111 class.

While attending the Academy, he wants to specialize in aerospace engineering while attending the Academy, and also participate on the Academy’s swim team.

“I’m going to go in there knowing that it takes listening to them to get through it,” Sitter said. He will be committed to the Navy for five years after graduation, as long as he doesn’t take any sort of specialized training options, like pilot training.

After graduation, he hopes to enter the field of politics or even be a musician like he’s always wanted. Sitter said he plays the guitar for his church youth group and jams with friends whenever he has free time, which isn’t very often. “I won’t be able to listen to music or play the guitar during my first year at the Academy because music is not allowed,” he said.

Sitter said the opportunities he will gain from the Academy will be a launch pad toward all sorts of paths. “The Academy will be an incredible base for so many careers, and I don’t want to give that up if I have that chance,” Sitter said.

Sitter will be leaving for Annapolis July 1 to attend Plebe Summer, which, according to the U.S. Naval Academy Web site, is “a period designed to turn civilians into midshipmen.”