CLIENT SPOTLIGHT: Gentner Drummond Discusses How Boy Scouts of America Paved the Road for Success

By all accounts, Gentner Drummond has achieved a high-level of success both professionally and personally on multiple platforms for a number of years.

The Oklahoma native has been a successful attorney, rancher, businessman, philanthropist and decorated military veteran and is now running for Oklahoma attorney general.

As Drummond, however, recently conveyed to Stava Building Corporation vice president LouAnn Smith during a video interview, he likely would not be where he is today without the experiences he had growing up as a member of the Boy Scouts of America.

In our Client Spotlight, Drummond, who has been heavily involved in the Jack Zink Adventure Base (ZBase) Project, discusses how the Boy Scouts of America prepared him and taught him the skills he would need to flourish professionally and in the military.

“The Boy Scout experiences (gave me) an opportunity to enhance my speaking skills, my leadership skills and management skills on a council-wide basis,” Drummond said during his interview with Smith. “It was a remarkable experience that provided me the fundamentals for survival in the wilderness to making an annual presentation on scouting to the governor for example as a 15-year old.”

Boy Scouts of America Ideal Training Ground for Military

The confidence and training he received during his tenure with the Boy Scouts of America culminated with an Eagle Scout ranking; it also helped Drummond successfully transition into the military.

“I enjoyed wearing that uniform and I was enthusiastic about serving in the military so it was a segue to go from boy scouting into the military,” Drummond said.

He additionally credits his training in Boy Scouts to helping him successfully navigate through the intensive water survival, land survival and POW training he went through as an officer in training with the Air Force.

He said while most officers typically lost between 15 and 20 pounds during land survival training, (“because you are basically foraging and providing your own food,”) he was able to gain weight through the skills he inherited while Boy Scouting.

Drummond said he was additionally able to pass the water survival training with “flying colors” thanks to his training, but where he gave most credit to his Boy Scouting experiences came in the POW training.

“The interesting thing was the POW training (which) is two components: one is escape and evasion and the other is the POW camp,” Drummond said. “There were 100 young pilots paired up in twos and we had a 25-mile course to complete over two days and bad guys throughout.

“I coincidentally was paired up with an Eagle Scout from Alabama. Of the 100 participants in that two-day exercise only two of us reached the destination uncaptured. It was the Alabama Eagle Scout and me. I attribute that truly to our mutual awareness of the environment and awareness to the outdoors and 100 percent of it to scouting.

“You are trained mental discipline in the Boy Scouts and that translated directly into the POW experience in the training environment so I attribute a lot of my early success in the military to Boy Scouting.”

Drummond Happy to Give Back, Stay Involved in the Boy Scouts of America

As a former past president for the Indian Nations Council of the Boy Scouts of America,

Drummond is as excited as anyone about the Jack Zink Adventure Base (ZBase) Project which will serve as one of the organization’s premier high-adventure outdoor camps.

Stava Building recently completed multiple facilities on the Zink Ranch campus in Skiatook and spotlighted the project on its website.

As a highly sought-after Tulsa construction company for 30 years and counting, Stava Building has been a constant provider of value and trusted building solutions for all construction needs, be it a repair, renovation, addition or new structure.

Their core services include Construction Management, General Construction and Design Build.

Stava is a trusted Tulsa-based company, with notable projects located all over the State of Oklahoma. Having a customer relationship focused company has led them to projects located in Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, Mississippi, Colorado, Nebraska, Louisiana and Arkansas.