COMBAT OUTPOST SANJARAY, Afghanistan - Standing 6 feet 9 inches tall, the West Point graduate and former football star, 2nd Lt. Alejandro Villanueva, is currently serving in Adirondack Company, 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, operating out of Combat Outpost Sanjaray, Kandahar province, Afghanistan.
Villanueva was not always a football player, however. While he was growing up, he spent a good portion of his school years in Europe and moving around the United States, because of his father’s military career.
“I grew up all over the place [because] my father is in the Navy,” said Villanueva. “I went to [school at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe]. My favorite sport growing up was swimming, but I was getting too heavy to swim by the time I was 15. I started playing football my junior year in high school.”
After he began playing though, it was obvious that he had huge potential as a football player, even though he had not played that much before. By the time college came around, he began looking into playing for several different schools.
“I went to West Point. Although, I was 99 percent committed in my head to go to Wisconsin or Boston College,” he said. “Initially, I went straight to Annapolis, and they offered me a football scholarship, but after doing my physical test at K-Town – Kaiserslautern - I think. It’s the Army hospital in Europe. They found out I was colorblind, and that limited the jobs I could do in the Navy. I couldn’t go Marines, pilot, EOD. After my recruiting trip to colleges I was looking at, they sold me the West Point option very well,” Villanueva said of how his friends influenced his decision to attend West Point.
While playing football at West Point, Villanueva was asked to play several different positions and performed well at all of them.
“When I was playing at West Point, I changed positions a lot. I was recruited to play defensive end,” he said. “Unfortunately, I did not play in a big school in the U.S., and I wasn’t very consistent. I had the size and strength, but I was too far behind. It took me a year to catch up to the rest of the players. After my freshman year, they moved me to left tackle. I bulked up, and I started the following season. That's when I realized I definitely had potential to play in the NFL.
“Right before my senior year, when I made up my mind that I was not new at the game, and I had a grasp of what it took to be a good player, they once again moved me to wide receiver. It was the wildest move I have ever seen. I was the heaviest player on the team playing out there by myself. At that point, I knew I wouldn’t be looked at, but the new coach had an idea at the time, and he thought it might work. The experiment turned out to be a good idea, but by then, I did not have a following season to get better and get more experience. I never got to focus on one position, and at that point, I thought I wasted my college career jumping from one position to another. However, the East-West Shrine game invited me to play tight end, another position that I never played. This time, I had an idea of what a ‘TE’ had to do, because it was a mix between tackle and wide receiver.
“The East-West experience was great and probably the best football memory I have to this day. I wasn’t great, but I had potential, and I felt really confident that I could play ‘TE’ in the NFL, especially after playing ‘TE’ for only a few days. The problem was that I was just about to finish my last semester at West Point and go from one adventure to the next one, and I knew for sure I was not getting out of my service. A couple of months after the East-West Shrine game, I got an invitation to play with the [Cincinnati] Bengals at their rookie mini-camp,” he said about the chance he had to play professional football.
Due to his service obligations to the Army, Villanueva was unable to go straight from college to the NFL.
“The experience was great though, and it made me more confident about seeing myself some day in the NFL,” he said. “I felt like I could compete with those guys and play at their level.”
Aside from the desire to play football, Villanueva also wanted to serve his country. He was deeply affected by the events of 9/11.
“It affected everyone, obviously,” he said of the affect Sept. 11 had on his decision to join the Army. “Time passed, and I thought I would never see Afghanistan. When the Academy option opened up, I felt it could give me a second chance to serve, in case my other options were closed,” he added about attending West Point.
As much as Villanueva considers what may have happened if he had gone to NFL instead of the Army, he honored his duty to serve.
“I couldn’t let myself be so selfish after seeing so many of my classmates and teammates deploy and serve,” he said.
While he is focused on the mission and serving as an infantry officer deployed to Afghanistan, he is still working out and keeping in shape to maybe someday have the chance to be a professional football player again.
“I'm on my own now to figure out if there is a possibility to get back in a helmet and shoulder pads,” Villanueva said.