Can sports be taught online during the coronavirus pandemic? IMG Academy has an answer.
For the past two months, Erich Miller hasn’t had teammates to pass the ball back and forth with.
Soccer, in Miller’s case, like all sports, was put on hiatus due to the global coronavirus pandemic.
So to keep up with training, Miller, an IMG Academy senior, had to get creative.
Trips to a high school down the road from his home in the San Francisco area provided walls to pass balls off of, and he used cinder blocks in his yard to hone the same skill.
He’s also propped spray bottles up to act as cones or obstacles to work on dribbling or passing through.
“I was actually surprised at how well they did,” said Miller, who is heading to High Point University in North Carolina next school year.
Miller is one of more than 1,200 students from across the world who attends IMG Academy, the private sports campus in Bradenton.
COVID-19, the respiratory illness from the novel coronavirus, swept through Florida when IMG students were enjoying spring break earlier than Manatee County public school students.
That allowed athletic director Scott Dean and head of school Chris Locke to get a jump on putting a virtual program together, combining four hours of athletic training and four hours of education.
Scheduling
That schedule is similar to what the student-athletes got pre-pandemic on IMG’s campus.
“There’s no down time for us,” said IMG Academy athletic director Scott Dean. “We’re persevering, we’re going to push forward, we are going to train. So early on … we were getting parents saying, ‘Hey, this a lot of work. This is a little too much.’ And we’re like, ‘No, no. This is the expectation if your kids were actually here. This is what they’d be doing. They’d be doing four hours of athletics and four or five hours of school every day. We’re not changing, we’re not altering. We’re just going to adapt.”
Unlike public schools in the county, every student attending IMG is also an athlete. The school stretches throughout the world, which presented a challenge when coordinating the virtual program for students in all different kinds of time zones during the COVID-19 quarantine.
Plus, some students don’t have the same access to equipment or yard if they were stuck inside an apartment in a city.
“The biggest challenge was quickly determining of our players around the world, which ones had access to fields, which ones had access to space in their backyard and which ones were basically confined to indoor access,” said IMG soccer general manager Alex Chater.
Despite those potential hurdles, Dean and Locke said they have an 85 percent engagement rate among its student body.
“Some of it is technology,” IMG head of school Chris Locke said. “Some of it is certain countries. When they’re back in China, they can’t access certain websites that are blocked. … The time zones are different, they’re struggling with that lack of engagement so we have a whole team that is trying to re-engage.”
Locke said a vast of majority are doing well and the ones who aren’t are handled on a case-by-case basis.
Good start
IMG already was utilizing an app called CoachNow, which allows coaches and athletes to go over video analysis and track progress among other tasks. That platform, in addition to Hudl, Zoom, Loom and Cisco WebEx, gave IMG a seamless transition into a virtual curriculum.
Pairing that with when IMG was on spring break, along with the educational virtual programs Admin Plus and Portal Plus, gave IMG staff more time to prepare for the launch.
And each sport had its own skills or tasks to do each day.
“It kind of followed the curriculum that we would have had if we were still on campus,” IMG Academy basketball director Brian Nash said. “It became more of a mental and IQ part of the basketball team.”
Those mental drills, Nash said, saw coaches grab film from their teams and get feedback from the players. There are also individual workouts, tailored for those with basketball hoops and those without access, Nash said.
Virtual star power
In addition to altering how student-athletes receive their training and education, IMG is switching to a virtual format for its sports banquets.
To help, IMG student-athletes and their families will see an eight-minute, 15-second video montage featuring alumni, legends and other sports personalities giving motivational messages.
Those messages were given to each sport on a weekly basis once IMG flipped to a virtual program.
Former University of Miami and Baltimore Ravens star Ray Lewis, as well as former Florida State and NFL legend Deion Sanders appear in the video package.
“And yeah, we are distracted by some things we’ve gotta deal with, right,” Lewis, a Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee, says in the video. “But let me tell you something. Every day of your life is a day to get better. There (are) no off days. Every day you get up, you have to figure out what’s my purpose?”
Sanders, a two-time Super Bowl champion and Hall of Famer like Lewis, continued with the motivational message.
“Are you working,” Sanders asks in the video. “Are you studying? Are you preparing? Are you doing what it takes for you to go to the next level?”
The two appear multiple times in the video package along with NFLPA executive director DeMaurice Smith; Washington Nationals outfielder Adam Eaton; Lakewood Ranch resident and sports broadcasting icon Dick Vitale; pro golfer Lydia Ko; former soccer player Tony Meola; former soccer player Tim Howard; Olympic track and field star Veronica Campbell; IMG alum Eduarda “Duda” Pavao; former soccer player Landon Donovan; tennis pro Sabine Lisicki; baseball player Logan Allen; Portland Trailblazers guard Anfernee Simons; golf teacher Sean Foley; former lacrosse star Paul Carcaterra; Orlando Magic forward Jonathan Isaac; lacrosse Hall of Famer Casey Powell; pro golfer Paul Lawrie; tennis pro Michael Mmoh; former tennis pro Brad Gilbert; former tennis pro Max Mirnyi; MLS player Marlon Hairsto; former Miami Hurricanes wide receiver and NFL rookie KJ Osborn; track and field stars Richard Thompson and Tyson Gay; former soccer player DaMarcus Beasley; and former MLB manager Buck Showalter.
Leaving an impression
IMG’s program has worked so well that college players have even taken notice.
Soccer player Emily Munguia, a senior heading to the University of Houston, recently took part in a training session, keeping with social distancing guidelines, with current college and graduating high school seniors.
“The college players were remarking at how in shape our player was compared to them,” Chater said. “It’s just great for us to hear that the work that the kids have been doing is on par or exceeding what some other players are doing.”
The creativity that Miller put together is also seen in other players, who have resorted to using the walls in their garages as if they had someone to pass to.
Dean said they also put together a competition aspect that could be technical or fun for each sport, as well as their training schedules.
This story was originally published May 20, 2020 at 2:21 PM.
