GENEVA, Ohio — Built in 2009, SPIRE Academy needed a decade to get fully up to speed, but they are there and they are growing. The decision to use the facility as a boarding high school for elite athletes has made all of the difference.
"SPIRE Institute has an enrollment of 220 students and it's grown rapidly in each of its first three years. Half of the students come from the us, the other half from 38 countries worldwide, Ben Shank, Director of SPIRE Camps, told 3News. "We help athletes uncover or discover their pathway into college, athletics, their career beyond being an athlete. So we give them all the tools that they're going to need, not just the training on the court, but also the time spent here in our performance training facility, as well as giving them mental skills."
Student athletes spend eight hours a day in SPIRE classrooms working towards their high school diploma, then spend a few hours each day training in world-class facilities guided by world-class coaches. Here, the student athletes can focus in on basketball, soccer, lacrosse, wrestling, track and field, swimming, eSports and volleyball.
"We have coaches that have come from a collegiate background, coaches that have played professionally, coaches that have competed in the Olympics across all of our sports. So the level of coaching that we provide is really unmatched," Shank said.
One of the coaches is Matt Ludwig. He's from Chardon, graduated from Akron and competed at the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo as a pole vaulter.
"I started training a bit here in 2014 in high school," he told me. "Been associated now with SPIRE for probably close to a decade, living here, training here, coaching here. It's everything I could hope for."
On the day we visited Spire, he was watching the Women's Olympic Pole Vault competition, and it had a strong tie to SPIRE.
"Katerina [Stefanidi] was the 2016 Olympic gold medalist who she is making easy work of a 15 foot clearance here, and she herself trained for a few years at Spire," Ludwig explained.
My son Corey, trained in the long jump here while preparing for the 2020 Olympic trials. After the Olympic Training Center in California was closed due to Covid, it was exactly what he needed.
"There's a lot of nice bells and whistles, really fancy, but the people that run it are good people and they really want what's best for the young student athlete," he said.
SPIRE also puts on countless camps in all of their sports offerings, bringing kids here with dreams of Olympic glory.
"My goal is later in life, I would like to go to the Olympics and get first, second, or third," camper Ellie McKain from Pittsburgh told me.
Her fellow camper Eli Jin, who traveled all the way to Northeast Ohio from London to attend camp here, has similar big dreams.
"Say a person wants to get to the Olympics, they need to have those small stepping stones. It's not like you're going to take a massive stride up 10 flights of stairs. You've got to take a step at a time."