With Veterans Day still fresh in our minds, many college football teams across the country will take the field today honoring those who have served this great nation. One football program, though, will be honoring ALL of the armed forces.
Earlier in the week, UCF unveiled the special helmets the team will wear for Military Appreciation Day game against Cincinnati. The school writes that “the left side of each helmet features a stars and stripes UCF stack logo, with a stars and stripes sword down the middle.”
The right side will be emblazoned with the logo of one of the five branches of the military -- Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard. Each player will get the opportunity to decide which branch they’d like to honor on their helmet.
The decision for one UCF player will be an easy one: defensive lineman Rory Coleman, an Army veteran and Purple Heart recipient who served a year-long deployment in Afghanistan as a combat medic. Coleman sustained his injuries, which included a punctured bowel and small intestine, fractured femur and epidural brain bleed, in a grenade blast in September of 2011.
I’d strongly urge you to read his story HERE.Our guys will be honoring the Armed Forces for Saturday’s noon showdown with Cincy.
The story 👉 https://t.co/wRlwoolUUs#UCFSalutes 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/w85gW62lJc
— UCF Football (@UCF_Football) November 10, 2016