Inside IMG Academy — the high school football factory that teams love to hate

BRADENTON, Fla. — In the moments after IMG Academy as soon as once more finishes lighting up a scoreboard someplace throughout the nation, its gamers are sometimes swarmed. Kids faucet gamers asking for a pair of gloves worn throughout one other IMG rout. They even ask for sweat-stained towels. Teenage contemporaries have their Snapchat apps open on their telephones and ask for selfies. Those who present up to watch IMG know they’re watching brightening stars who will quickly explode onto the nationwide school football scene.

“These kids are rock stars,” IMG coach Billy Miller stated.

These are additionally high school college students.

IMG, nonetheless, will not be your common prep football powerhouse. IMG’s sprawling 600-acre campus, bathed in sunshine and palm bushes, features a 5,000-seat stadium for observe and football, a state-of-the-art efficiency and sports activities science heart and its personal 150-room luxurious resort for guests. A Johns Hopkins University hospital affiliate manages all well being companies and bodily remedy, in accordance to the school’s web site.

Since Florida State’s 2000 Heisman Trophy winner, Chris Weinke, helped launch IMG’s football program in 2010, the Ascenders have gone 92-7. That features a 38-game successful streak, the 2020 nationwide title and blowout wins over a number of of the nation’s prime high school packages. IMG had 14 alumni on NFL rosters as the season opened, the most of any high school in the nation, in accordance to the NFL.

The boarding school with 75 former gamers on rosters of Power 5 school packages, together with seven on two-time defending nationwide champion Georgia, retains annihilating opponents.

Last 12 months, the Ascenders beat West Toronto Prep, 96-0. Most IMG video games are blowouts — whether or not it’s an ideal high school workforce lining up throughout the area or an 0-7 workforce like WTP. This 12 months’s workforce has gamers who’re dedicated to packages akin to Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee and Georgia.

Remember the Bishop Sycamore charade? IMG is the program that awkwardly stampeded over what would finally be found to be a fabricated school and program on nationwide tv.

In 2020, IMG went on the street and beat nationally ranked Duncanville, Texas, 41-14. The Ascenders haven’t landed a single Texas high school workforce on their schedule since.

Some colleges have stopped answering cellphone calls to play once more, stated Miller, who coaches the nationwide workforce. Some who haven’t performed IMG don’t hassle to reply to emails, texts or calls in any respect. The Athletic reached out to packages in 5 totally different states that have performed IMG lately and the solely coaches who have been prepared to focus on IMG have been lately approached in individual at a event in Florida.

IMG’s ascent in the prep football world has left many football followers pondering widespread questions: Is IMG Academy too good? And who precisely is monitoring its recruiting practices?

The program with rock stars at practically each place may be the most dominant school in the nation, however it’s not with out its detractors. Some coaches have accused IMG of actively recruiting gamers away from their packages, promoting the IMG actuality that, in Bradenton, you may simulate life as a future school football student-athlete extra precisely than wherever else and observe and play alongside the finest expertise in the nation. Others have determined to see IMG’s rise as a gold normal of kinds.

“The thing I try to teach my guys is to run to the fire, not from it,” stated Messay Hailemariam, who coaches St. Frances Academy in Baltimore, certainly one of the common staples on IMG’s schedule every season.

IMG Academy began as the Nick Bollettieri tennis academy in 1978, a spot for tennis prodigies. It’s the place Venus and Serena Williams developed into legends. In the years since, IMG has expanded to 15 sports activities and produced a whole lot of Olympic {and professional} athletes.

But what’s now certainly one of the preeminent high school football packages in the nation began in a single-wide trailer surrounded by tomato fields. Weinke educated at IMG in the months after his stellar profession at Florida State resulted in 2000. Ten years later, he was employed to discover a method to add football to the academy’s rising record of distinguished sports activities. Weinke advised IMG it will take 5 years to get a football program off the floor. It took him and his newly assembled employees three.

There simply wasn’t anywhere to do it at the time.

“I had to literally order my own football equipment. I did not have a football field. I had to utilize a soccer field,” stated Weinke, now co-offensive coordinator at Georgia Tech. “I was on a campus that was much different today than it was back then.”

The idea for what IMG football may turn out to be over time began to materialize.

“My whole vision and goal of that program was to mirror what a college football program looked like so that players who left IMG were more prepared and ready to play at an earlier age in college than your typical high school player,” Weinke stated.

IMG started to buy extra land round its expansive campus. Those tomato fields, Weinke stated, quickly turned football-specific observe fields. Football gamers used to share a weight room with different athletes earlier than the 55,000-square-foot IMG Performance & Sports Science Center was constructed. All this was essential for IMG to attain that aim Weinke envisioned early on.

Now?

The football program has 155 gamers unfold out over 4 teams, Miller stated. It begins with the star-studded nationwide squad, however there are additionally two varsity teams (IMG white and IMG blue) and a postgraduate workforce, which received the National Post Graduate Athletic Association championship final 12 months. The rosters on the varsity and postgraduate teams aren’t very massive so gamers get extra taking part in time. That’s by design.

“The only downfall about going there is that when you leave there to go play college football, the facilities may be worse than what you just had in high school,” Weinke stated, laughing.

Commitment. Sacrifice. Hard work. When you come to @IMGAcademy, it’s greater than you.

Protect the #Brotherhood. pic.twitter.com/mftZBY8b6G

— IMG Academy Football (@IMGAFootball) August 18, 2023

Kevin Wright, who succeeded Weinke after Weinke left to be the quarterbacks coach for the St. Louis Rams in January 2015, remembers going to go to former star linebacker Dylan Moses at Alabama only a few months after Moses graduated from IMG in December 2016. Moses advised Wright that life at Alabama — sure, Alabama — was a breeze in contrast to the strict schedule as a student-athlete at IMG.

“We’ve never had so much free time in our lives,” Moses joked with Wright.

Wright, who coached at IMG till 2019, has spent the previous 4 seasons as tight ends coach at Indiana. He reiterated that whereas IMG comes with all the perks of constructing a modern-day star athlete, it doesn’t work with out embracing the grind of the schedule and life-style. That’s what Weinke wished to construct, in any case.

“That place is tough,” Wright stated. “It is absolutely not for everybody.”

Football followers may know Josh Lambo as a kicker who spent practically a decade taking part in in the NFL, however he began out as a member of the U.S. youth soccer workforce at IMG. Lambo lived the Bradenton life earlier than he transitioned from soccer to football, however stated the rigors of IMG ready him for the pressures of life and the place.

“We weren’t really allowed to be kids, but being a kid is overrated,” he stated. “I’d rather be successful as an adult than have fun as a kid.”

Winston Watkins has so much going for him.

He’s the cousin of 2014 NFL first-round choose Sammy Watkins and an elite high school receiver in the graduating class of 2025 who’s dedicated to play at Colorado for Deion Sanders.

He probably nonetheless would’ve developed into certainly one of the most coveted recruits in his class had he not transferred to IMG in ninth grade. But there’s a purpose Watkins purchased the recruiting pitch when he was nonetheless an eighth grader: IMG’s top-notch infrastructure and its observe document of placing gamers into the NFL.

“IMG gives me that exposure I need and also keeps me from all that nonsense I don’t need to be around,” stated Watkins, who caught 25 passes for 393 yards and 10 touchdowns on the Ascenders nationwide workforce final season as a sophomore, and who’s ranked the fifty fifth finest participant in his class in accordance to the 247Sports Composite.

“I get to be around greats all the time. If I stayed in Fort Myers, I feel like I wouldn’t be as good as I am now because I wouldn’t have to try at practice. Because there’s a lot of kids who don’t care about football. Here, I go against the best of the best in practice and real games.”

Watkins transferred to Naples First Baptist final week, he stated lately in a social media put up, to be nearer to an ailing member of the family. But he beloved his time at IMG.

Players at IMG stated they’re satisfied entry to world-class services, prime coaches, a college-type schedule — observe in the morning and school in the afternoon — whereas dwelling on campus prepares them for the subsequent degree in methods going to a standard school can not.

Alabama freshman defensive again Desmond Ricks, who transferred to IMG after his freshman 12 months of high school in Norfolk, Va., stated IMG helped him hone his time administration expertise. Talk to present IMG nationwide workforce gamers, and also you hear a lot of the similar causes they left their respective high school packages.

“I wasn’t mature enough to come and leave my family when IMG first recruited me as a high school sophomore, but at the end of my junior season I was like, I need to enroll early (in college). I need to handle my business and this is a school that I felt prepares you,” stated four-star offensive sort out Jordan Seaton, who transferred to IMG from St. John’s Catholic school in Washington, D.C., in May.

“I’m not saying I wasn’t prepared back there. But this school is as close to a college as you get. Being able to breathe this life, eat this life — sleep, eat, sleep, work — doing it over and over again consistently, I feel like I’m one step closer to my big goal.”

Seaton, whom Miller compares to 2022 No. 7 choose and former IMG star Evan Neal, has trimmed his physique fats down to 8.4 p.c after weighing as a lot 350 kilos at his earlier school. He’s labored with nutritionists at IMG and altered his food plan. At 6-5, 300 kilos, he’s certainly one of the prime remaining uncommitted high school recruits in the 2024 cycle. Alabama, Florida, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Colorado are amongst his present leaders.

Attending IMG isn’t low-cost. The school web site listed the football program’s tuition for the 2022-23 school 12 months starting from $65,400 to $87,900 per 12 months relying on age, boarding and grade of student-athlete. Some obtain monetary assist. Others don’t. Sponsorship from corporations akin to Under Armour and Gatorade helps cowl a few of the prices.

“Everybody paid something, I know that,” Wright stated. “At the end of the day, it’s a for-profit business.”

The day The Athletic visited campus, there was an indication posted in the males’s rest room above a urinal reminding college students on campus to ensure they have been fully outfitted in Under Armour attire.

Endeavor, the dad or mum firm of International Management Group, bought IMG Academy to a Hong Kong-based personal fairness agency in April for $1.25 billion. The academy generates roughly $80 million a 12 months, in accordance to Zippia, and doesn’t take part in the Florida High School Athletic Association state playoffs, partly, as a result of it recruits gamers globally.

High school coaches and fan bases aren’t completely happy when IMG recruits their finest gamers away to be part of its star-studded nationwide workforce roster.

“I can tell you there’s plenty of high school coaches that didn’t like me,” Weinke stated. “I can promise you that. And that’s OK. My ultimate goal was to put something in place to create opportunities for young men to maximize their potential. Bottom line.”

St. John Bosco coach Jason Negro, whose workforce from Bellflower, Calif., ranks tenth in the nationwide polls, is a kind of coaches. He stated IMG recruited away certainly one of his prime receivers in 2018, Josh Delgado, who’s now at Oregon. Delgado had the provide from Oregon earlier than he left for IMG, Negro confirmed.

“The only problem that I have (with IMG) is there’s no governing body that regulates their ability to chase after players,” Negro stated. “We are bound by rules in terms of contact period, undue influence. My kids are constantly called by people from their organization, and that doesn’t sit well with me. If I have a kid that chooses to go there or come to me, I’m not opposed to transfers. But what I don’t understand is they want to call my players and call two weeks later to play a game. That doesn’t sit well with me. Coach your guys up with your people. But don’t come and actively hunt my guys.”

Negro stated he’d schedule IMG if he may, however Bosco can’t as a result of California state guidelines don’t permit it to play versus colleges ineligible for their very own state event. Bosco’s rival, Mater Dei, beat IMG, 28-24, in 2018 earlier than state guidelines modified, Negro stated.

The packages who do schedule the Ascenders, Miller stated, are led by “like-minded people” who “want to play good football programs.” IMG opened the season with a 35-10 win at Nashville’s Lipscomb Academy and a 17-14 victory in opposition to Philadelphia’s St. Joseph’s Prep, two colleges that received state championships final 12 months. They defeated Indianapolis’ Ben Davis, certainly one of Indiana’s top-ranked packages, 34-14, and Glenville (Ohio) 28-6. Bartram Trail (Fla.), which went 12-1 final season, is up subsequent on Oct. 6.

#Oklahoma 5-star DL commit David Stone with a ridiculous 94yd choose six to put IMG Academy up 27-7 at Indianapolis Ben Davis in the third. A vital play as the residence workforce had momentum. https://t.co/sduoLIuZjx pic.twitter.com/R0xxNO28E2

— Steve Wiltfong (@SWiltfong247) September 9, 2023

There are solely two teams ranked forward of IMG in MaxPreps nationwide rankings: top-ranked Santa Ana (Calif.) Mater Dei and Las Vegas (Nev.) Bishop Gorman.

“(IMG) reached out to us, but our schedule was full,” stated Hollywood (Fla.) Chaminade coach Dameon Jones, whose workforce has received 5 state titles in the previous seven years and is ranked two spots behind IMG in MaxPreps’ nationwide rankings at No. 5. “We played them my first year (in 2016, losing 43-0). They showed us where we had to get to.”

IMG’s Anthony Rogers, a four-star operating again in the Class of 2025 who’s dedicated to Alabama, stated his outdated high school teammates and coaches referred to as him a traitor when he transferred to IMG in March and advised him he “wouldn’t be able to compete at this level.”

Miller waved off the notion that IMG’s ascent is a blemish on the state of prep football.

“To me, whoever has something negative to say, it’s probably envy,” he stated. “You can’t say one thing until you live it. You have no idea what it’s about.”

Like dozens of his teammates, four-star linebacker Nathaniel Owusu-Boateng is in the midst of his school recruitment course of. Name a blue-blood program, and it has already supplied. In selecting a school, although, Owusu-Boateng is in search of out an expertise that will present him there’s extra to life than simply football. He needs to be ready for the time football ends.

But so as to look past football method down the line, he had to take into consideration the football path he’s on first — the one that introduced him to IMG this spring from Hyattsville, Md.

“It was a business move, but at the same time a great move,” he stated. “Knowing the guys who came in and came out, you can just see the cause and effect.”

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; Photos: Manny Navarro / The Athletic)