To get the full story, please also reference these two videos featuring Steve Sanders and Ted Meekma.
Steve Sanders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_NlOjjgU8E
Ted Meekma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sn1KlMg9fVo

“Sports academies hold a unique place in the industry because they are the ultimate hybrid of athletics and academics. You have boarding schools that are great with academics and have one or two sports they excel in, but the model the schools are built around doesn’t allow a student athlete to grow in both areas at the same time. Sports academies like SPIRE give every student athlete that opportunity. We’re also able to mix in the mental wellbeing and mindset aspect, the nutrition aspect and the performance aspect. Over time, all this working together helps the student athlete develop as an entire person, which is ultimately what we’re after.” 

So says Steve Sanders, Chief Executive Officer at SPIRE. Steve has been with SPIRE since 2019 and became CEO last fall. He has four children himself, all of whom are heavily involved in sports, and so brings defined ideas to the running of SPIRE that just so happen to jibe perfectly with the athletic and academic philosophy already in place. Steve: “We have to provide industry-leading academics. Sports academies in general get a bad rap on that, and at SPIRE we’re on a pathway to lead the industry in academics. We’re doing that through partnerships, how we implement technology and our hybrid learning models, which allow our students to continue to learn while they’re competing across the globe. The academy piece is so important because our focus is on creating a more well-rounded human being. We’re less concerned with how many kids we’re putting in college and competing at the Division I level than how many all-around leaders, team captains, entrepreneurs and sports-industry executives we’re creating.”

A genuine focus on the whole person. A long-term view of the student athlete versus a short-term one. That’s the SPIRE difference. That’s The SPIRE Way. And it’s not just the CEO who’s keeping this idea top of mind. Ted Meekma is SPIRE’s Chairman. Like Steve, Ted has been involved with SPIRE for a long time, and just became Chairman in the fall. But Ted’s experience in the sports academy industry (such as it is; there aren’t many of them) goes back to his co-founding of IMG Academy. Ted: “With Nick Bollettieri, we had worked with good tennis players—in camps and clubs and resorts—but we never had time to really develop a player, a competitive athlete; they were gone before we got that far. So we thought about how we could find an environment where we could train kids equally on both sides of the equation—have them maybe go to school five hours a day and then train four hours a day for an entire school year. We looked around for that kind of opportunity but there was no such thing, so we started our own tennis academy, followed by other sports. It quickly became apparent that, for the right kind of student athlete, it was an amazing environment.”

When it comes to The SPIRE Way, and what makes for an amazing environment, size matters, though not in the way you might think, i.e., in the case of a sports academy, smaller is definitely better. Again, Ted: “Here at SPIRE, we have a lot of flexibility in terms of being more personalized. We can work on character development. We can start to talk to the kids about career direction and preparation. We can focus on all the many aspects of student athlete development in a very hands-on way. But even as we grow—which we will, because we have so much land for building out more fields and facilities—since a lot of the core staff will still be here, SPIRE will always be run in a very personal, hands-on manner. We can’t lose sight of the fact that we’re here for the kids. If a family brings their child here, they’re putting a lot of faith in us. We have to be a second family. Sometimes people in this industry are so focused on winning and losing, they forget the big picture. We’re trying to get our student athletes ready for college and work and life. We’re in the training-and-development world, not the short-term win world.” 
In case you missed it, make sure you check out the video at the top of the page. You’ll see and hear Steve and Ted talk further about what makes SPIRE Academy such a very different kind of sports academy.