IMG Academy: Meet college football’s recruiting gold mine

When you think of gold mines in the college football recruiting circuit, IMG Academy comes to mind. What makes the program so great?

IMG Academy isn’t like most boarding schools and as you might imagine, it really isn’t for most students. In short, IMG essentially serves as a training ground for the nation’s best athletes to reach their full potential.

It’s able to attract the best players because it has arguably the best facilities, resources and coaching in the entire country.

Just to paint a quick picture of the culture and vibe at IMG Academy — in their own words they describe themselves as a school that’s“fueled by the scent of victory” and “win everywhere”.

With that in mind, when the academy first formed a football team in 2013, it naturally hired a former Heisman Trophy winner, Chris Weinke to be the head coach and built a brand new stadium with 5,000 seats.

In true IMG fashion, it provided the team with a fully-loaded fieldhouse sporting a professional grade locker room, film room and cutting edge tech like STRIVR virtual reality. It even has a four-star hotel right on campus so visitors can stay right there in the thick of it all.

Simply based on what IMG Academy offers its students in the form of coaching, resources and facilities, it’s clear it hasn’t just raised the bar, it threw the old one out and replaced it with the finest, state of the art bar money can buy.

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In 2013, Weinke and his IMG Academy Ascenders debuted on the high school football scene by going 8-2 in their inaugural season. They only had one ESPN300 prospect on the roster but quarterback Michael O’Connor was an international recruit from Canada and even though he was the only top recruit on the Ascenders in that first season he was certainly a sign of things to come.

O’Connor would go on to play at Penn State and prove to be the first droplet of what would eventually turn into a talent tidal wave to wash into Bradenton, Fla., over the next six seasons.

In 2014, IMG improved its record to a nearly perfect 10 -1 and went from having a roster with only one top-ranked recruit to having three in the ESPN300 and a total of six players in the Florida top 100. As impressive as that may seem, IMG was only getting warmed up and over the next four seasons. Under the direction of new head coach Kevin Wright, it would go 36-1 and produced an astounding 38 ESPN300 recruits and a whopping 57 players in the Florida top 100.

Over this same time period, the football program produced a total of 12 five-star recruits, 29 Under Armour All-Americans, 140 Division 1 commitments and essentially became a college football recruiting gold mine.

It’s no small thing when a coach like Nick Saban praises a high school program like he has IMG Academy — not good, but great. It’s extremely high praise when you consider Saban is widely-regarded as the greatest college football coach of all time.

IMG Academy’s impact on the game as a whole is yet to be determined but with only six seasons under its belt it’s astonishing to read the list of this young program’s accomplishments. If IMG does only one thing to the sport of college football it would be saving recruiters an unbelievable amount of time.

Consider this, IMG Academy has players from 18 different states. If a college recruiter was interested in all 18 of these IMG players and wanted to see them play, they have the luxury of making only one trip to see all 18.  Compare that to how much time it would take to actually travel and meet with each individual player if they all went to their hometown high school.

Another point to be made is great players need to play against and train with other great players in order to improve and get to the next level. IMG Academy gives players an unprecedented opportunity to play and train on what is essentially an all-star team, resulting in a timely amount of growth and development that would have otherwise had to have taken place during the player’s freshman and sophomore year in college.

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Instead, however, they’re able to hit the ground running and in most cases be in the unique position to be one of the few true freshmen on their respective team who can actually make an impact right away.

It’s not uncommon for freshmen to have the raw talent to make an impact on their team but to have had the training and to be able to demonstrate to your head coach that you have the discipline to be that impact player on day one is a truly rare thing for a college coach to have on his roster.

It would absolutely be fair to assume that IMG Academy is currently producing more true freshman impact players than any other high school in the country. Not only does this help teams win games, but it saves college coaches an enormous amount of time and energy.

Perhaps that’s IMG Academy’s biggest impact on the sport of football: time. Saving recruiters time, saving coaches time and energy working on a player’s fundamentals like footwork and decision making and then of course — the players who grow and develop at IMG will in many cases mature into the best version of themselves much faster and in turn, would likely be ready for the NFL sooner or maybe even have longer prime in their career.

Regardless of how much time a particular coach or player saves through IMG, one thing is crystal clear — it’s IMG Academy’s time to shine in the world of high school football and it seems like that’s certainly going to be the case for the foreseeable future.