This is sort of football related because one of our players, Broc Brando from Lincoln, attended the IMG academy.
I am on vacation in Florida and
I recently spent 5 days lodging at the IMG academy. The place is amazing. For junior athletes, it might be the best sports training academy in the world.
The campus is 600 acres! It provides world class training in football, soccer, track & field, baseball, basketball, golf, tennis, and lacrosse...and I may have missed a couple more.
I looks like a typical college campus, however just like a military post, you must have authorization to gain access.
IMG has an East and a West Campus. The East campus is for tennis and basketball. The basketball facility has four full-size basketball courts in one building. They have 4 indoor tennis courts and about 50 outdoor tennis courts.
The West campus is where all of the students live...in modern 4-story dormitories. The 2 campuses are about 500 yards apart (separated by an ominous swamp) and trams run every 10 minutes to take folks to and from each campus. The swamp is crossed on a long wooden bridge.
The West campus is huge. It has the dorms, the schools, the cafeteria, and the large fields for all of the other sports.
Both campuses have facilities for weight training and sports medicine/rehab.
I am sure we all trained for our sports after school. That's not how it is done at IMG. On every school day, the tennis players were on the courts training from 8 to 11:30 AM...with one tennis pro on every court and not more than 4 students on a court. On a normal day, I'd say 30 to 40 courts were being used...and all of the kids were excellent players...world class junior players. I suppose that is true of all the athletes that attend IMG...you have to be a top notch athlete to get an invitation to attend IMG. To me it looked like none of the students had more than 4% body fat.
The student-athletes come from all over the world. I ate at the cafeteria a few times and one time I found myself standing in line behind a 7-footer from China.
The kids attend academic classes in the afternoon. Like a military academy, they all wore the same uniform every day, but it is an athletic uniform of one kind or another.
Anyway, the IMG academy was the brain child of tennis pro Nick Bollettieri. Many years ago it started out as the Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida (a year-round resident tennis academy with the students attending Bradenton high school). Nick hooked up with IMG and they expanded it to include other sports and now they have their own academic school. It's like a private small town.
I ran into Nick while I was there. He is 87 years old now and he still spends time on the courts teaching. I told him that his vision has had a positive impact on countless thousands of people and then I gave him a salute. He saluted me back and told me he was once an Army paratrooper.
Our HC Scott Frost and Nick Bolletterri have a couple things in common...they are both great visionaries who are having a positive impact on the lives many, many people.
Nick Bollettieri
