By Paulina Kosturos Khoury
Several service members were awarded Sailor of the Year awards!
Master-at-Arms Seaman Rebekah Provencher was named Blue Jacket of the Year, Aviation Maintenance Administrationman 2nd Class Marcus Jefferson was awarded Junior Sailor of the Year, and Master-at-Arms 1st Class Yanitsa Wiley was honored with Sailor of the Year. The informal ceremony took place on Oct. 21 in the small gym.
NSA Bahrain’s commanding officer, Capt. Darren Guenther, was there to announce the winners, provide remarks and explain how the awardees were selected.
“This is a really long process where we celebrate the best of who we are and what we do for our Sailors and how we identify our best Sailors. At this time of year, we get together and first and foremost, we get groups of our Blue Jacket nominees. Blue Jackets are E-4 and below. And we get our groups of nominees for our Junior Sailor of the Year. Those who are E-5s and then we get our Sailor of the Year nominees. Those are our E-6s,” Guenther explained.
“Anybody know how we come up with those nominees? Here’s how we come up with them: We get everyone who’s nominated for a quarterly award whose still here […] who can represent us going forward. But we take a look at who won a quarterly Blue Jacket, Junior or Sailor of the Year Award and we [move] that into our group of nominees. And then we take our departments and we ask for any nominations from our leadership in our departments so we get an expert group of folks in there,” he said.
Guenther also emphasized the arduous nature of the vetting process.
“And let me tell you, for a couple of our categories, we had anywhere from three to at least seven nominees […] And then there’s a board process. It’s pretty exciting. Each of those nominees gets to sit down […] and answer all kinds of questions. There are easy questions […] but then there are questions like, ‘What is the U.S. Navy doing in Indonesia today?’”
Overall, Guenther offered praise to all of the nominees who went through the rigorous selection process.
“Each and every one of you who went through this, congratulations. Well done. Because each and every one of you were finalists,” he said.
| Date Taken: | 10.21.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 11.05.2018 03:03 |
| Story ID: | 298154 |
| Location: | BH |
| Web Views: | 817 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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