The Dalles High School's Cody Agidius headed to Naval Academy

And earlier this year — on Valentine’s Day, actually — years of effort paid off when Cody, a senior at The Dalles High School, became one of 1,200 people appointed to the U.S. Naval Academy’s incoming class of 2029. 

Cody, the son of Steve and Dawn Agidius, is the whole package: He’s a 4.0 student and a class valedictorian who wants to go into aerospace engineering; he’s a varsity baseball player who plays first base and bats cleanup; he has a part-time job; and he volunteers by helping with Little League and visiting with veterans.

And now that he’s heading to the Naval Academy — he leaves June 24 — his parents couldn’t be prouder. “We’re absolutely, completely over the moon thrilled,” Dawn said.

His parents also noted that he did the entire arduous application effort on his own.

Cody was so set on gaining acceptance to a service academy that getting in “wasn’t a big surprise,” he said. “It wasn’t as dramatic as it should’ve been.”

Cody calls himself stubborn. Dawn prefers “driven.” Steve offered “bullheaded.”

His parents learned when he was very young that Cody was something special. Dawn recalled his first grade teacher at St. Mary’s Academy sending her a picture one afternoon of Cody holding a puzzle shaped like a sphere.

The teacher, who’d taught at the school for decades, told her she’d never had a student be able to complete the puzzle before.

A few years later, another teacher told them Cody was gifted, and was academically well above his grade level.

But he absolutely doesn’t have a single ounce of know-it-all in him.

“He doesn’t make anyone feel inferior to him or less intelligent than him. Never, ever,” Dawn said. “And you’d never know he was really smart unless you were digging deep, because he has normal conversations.”

But there’s a running joke in the Agidius family — older brother Austin is an incoming senior at the University of Idaho — that Cody is the smartest of them all.

“Nobody’s in denial,” Steve quipped.

Steve said Cody doesn’t just retain things he reads, he can make sense of them and apply the knowledge.

School has not always been a challenge for Cody and he’s looking forward to the rigors of the Naval Academy, which is located in Annapolis, Maryland.

“I’m excited about being with people like me that have the same mindset and personality as me, people that are always striving to be toward something,” he said.

He’s also not a procrastinator. “That’s definitely a strength of mine. I like to be done with stuff so I’m very efficient with school work.”

And while Cody is one of his baseball team’s best players — in one 2023 game he had two three-run home runs — he never expected sports to propel him to college. “I’m a good player on my team, but I’m nothing special.”

Cody couldn’t apply to the military academy until the end of junior year, so in the meantime, he just took every hard class he could, stepped up his fitness, and beefed up his volunteer hours.

He’s taken five tests in college-level Advanced Placement (AP) classes, where 5 is a perfect score. He’s gotten two 5s and two 4s, and is awaiting his AP European History score.

People tried to talk Cody out of his service academy goal, “but I’m a very stubborn person and this is what I’m going to do and I’m not changing that plan at all,” he said.

Doubters thought it was too hard for him, “But I didn’t think it was too hard for me, and I also wanted to prove them wrong.”

Cody and Steve are “history nerds,” Dawn said, and they both love watching military history shows. Cody isn’t sure where his interest in the military came from, but thinks his time watching the History Channel played a role.

“I would see it and I would read about it, and I would be like, this is pretty cool. They get to serve their country, they get to protect the people at home,” Cody said.

His favorite subjects are math and history. “I’m good at math and I find it — I don’t want to say fun, but it’s really interesting to me. And then history, I get it from my dad. He’s a history guy. I love history. All my favorite classes are usually history classes.”

The academy application process is an arduous slog. It’s lots of essays — both for the congressmen and senators who must nominate a candidate as well as for the academies themselves. (U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz and U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden both nominated him for academies.)

“He spent months writing essays,” Steve said. “He’s a wonderful writer, an excellent writer.”

Then came a fitness test — he thanked The Dalles High School PE/Health Teacher Garth Miller and his baseball coach, Patrick Clark, for administering the test — a medical and eye exam, and finally, a crucial interview with a representative of the academy.

He had to answer tons of questions on an application. Any tattoos? Any arrests? That was “No” and “No,” for Cody. Also, “I’ve never touched a drug, except Ibuprofen.”

As for his career goals, Cody wants to be a pilot. “Why? Because it’s so cool, that’s why. I thought it would be a neat job to fly for a living.” Military pilots told him, “‘You’re never working, you’re always doing what you love.’ That stuck with me. If I’m going to be doing something the rest of my life, it better be something I love.”

He’s 6-feet, 4-inches, but even at that height, he still can qualify to fly nearly all aircraft.

He’s not looking forward to the first part of boot camp, which involves shaving off his curly hair. “It’s gonna be horrible,” he said. “But everyone else will look like me also.”

And as for those military guys from the gym who got him started on his whole quest?

“That’s what I think was crazy,” Cody said. “I met them that day, they told me that, it clicked in my mind and that was my goal: I’m going to go to a military service academy. And I never saw them again, and that was that.”