As the Olympics Are In Full Swing, Former Olympians Dedicate Time to Helping Middle and High School Students Excel

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES, July 30, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- What does Maggie Steffens, a Paris 2024 Summer Olympian and 3-time water polo gold medalist, have in common with Novak Djokovic, Bode Miller, Kerri Walsh Jennings, Vincent Zhou, Monica Seles, Michael Hixon, and Steve Nash - aside from being Olympic athletes? They are all champion mentors for the ICL Foundation and ICL’s accredited virtual school for 5th-12th grade, ICL Academy, that caters to high performance students (e.g. athletes, actors, recording artists) so they can pursue their primary passion while getting an exceptional education.

“All of our champion mentors volunteer their time and life wisdom to our ICL Fellows because they truly care about education and inspiring the next generation of young leaders and champions,” says Kirk Spahn, founder of the ICL Foundation. “They support the school’s mission of building the whole person, talking with students about life goals and challenges, and not necessarily just about the sport itself.”

The mentors work with the students in a variety of ways, from holding live webinars on topics such as training and teamwork, to giving keynote speeches on the importance of education, to meet-ups with students in person as opportunities arise.

ICL Champion Mentor Maggie Steffens, who is captain of the USA’s 2024 Olympic water polo team, places a high value on the balance of academics and sport. “I support ICL Academy because I always want to emphasize to athletes and to parents that there's a way to be balanced,” says Steffens. “If you start lacking purpose, passion, and effort in your academics, you're creating a bad habit. If you can create good habits out of your sport when it comes to academics, that's going to relate to how you are as an athlete as well.”

Former Olympic gold medalist in Alpine skiing Bode Miller partnered with ICL Academy in 2020 to launch a Bode Miller winter sports academy, relying on ICL Academy for the academics. “The type of virtual education that ICL Academy offers is a total game changer,” says Miller. “It allows students to operate on their own schedules, get a first-class education, and still develop into whomever they are meant to be.”

Several ICL Academy current and former students have been or are aspiring to be Olympic athletes. “We will be watching the Olympics with a different perspective than the average spectator,” says Spahn. “Everyone at ICL, from students to champion mentors, observe and model the behaviors of these high performance individuals, dreaming of how they will maximize their potential in their chosen passion or pursuit.”

Other ICL champion mentors are titans in their respective fields, and hail from the worlds of business, film and television, journalism, and the performing arts.

About ICL Foundation
The ICL Foundation's mission for over 2 decades has been to inspire, educate and support aspiring youth leaders to make a positive impact on their local and global community.

Now in its 23rd year, the ICL Foundation is dedicated to shaping a future where flexible, world-class education becomes economically accessible to all high-achieving students. For students, based on need and merit, the Impact Learning Model™ enables high performing students to emerge as leaders within the global community. This combines elite accredited courses, character and service leadership training, mentorship, mental skills training, and real world application. The ICL foundation includes global icons and world champions as mentors to the ICL Fellows. Champions mentors include: Novak Djokavic, Monica Seles, Bode Miller, Nirav Tolia, Clive Davis, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Malcolm Gladwell, Kerri Walsh Jennings, Steve Nash, Bode Miller, and many others

About ICL Academy
Born out of the ICL Foundation’s Impact Learning Model™, ICL Academy offers world-class academics in a year-round accredited online school. In 2015, the first incarnation of ICL Academy was founded by educator Kirk Spahn, and accredited as a grade 5-12 hybrid school in Los Angeles, focused on performing arts students. In 2019, ICL Academy became a fully online school, and expanded to meet the needs of driven students across the country. ICL's vibrant community was built on, and continues to revolve around, the foundation of the 6 P's: Passion, Purpose, Process, Perspective, Perseverance, and Personalization.

Joanna Brody
Brody Public Relations
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