Blue White Illustrated

etting fired is not pleasant for any- one, and it's even worse when it happens a few days before Christ- mas. But as Keith Goganious knew from his years playing linebacker for Joe Pa- terno, "things either get better or get worse, they don't stay the same," as the coach often reminded his teams in one of his favorite quotes. Things certainly got better for Gogan- ious. Three months after his controversial dismissal as head coach at Bishop McNa- mara High School in the highly competi- tive and well-regarded Washington (D.C.) Catholic Athletic Conference, Goganious joined one of the most high-profile scholastic football programs in the na- tion, IMG Academy. Actually, football is a relatively new en- tity for IMG, an international multisport development and training center that is located in Bradenton on Florida's Gulf Coast and includes a boarding school and education curriculum from preschool through high school. The academy started as a tennis boarding school in 1978 before being acquired by the New York- based entertainment and talent-manage- ment company IMG in 1987. Since then, it has expanded into other sports and var- ious enterprises, ranging from on-site athletic training and education to sports camps and refreshers for professional athletes. The football program was started in 2010 and now includes a high school team that is rated one of the best in the country and competes nationwide against other elite high schools like Long Beach Poly. The team also has a tie-in with the renowned Under Armour All- America game. On its website, IMG Academy boasts of dozens of alumni who have participated in its campus activities. Many of the foot- ball players listed were vaguely familiar to this writer, but one name stood out: quarterback Chris Weinke. After playing minor league baseball for seven years and nearly breaking into the majors, the then- 25-year-old Weinke enrolled at Florida State. He won the Heisman Trophy in 2000, played in the NFL with the Car- olina Panthers and in 2010 became the first director of IMG Academy's football program and head coach of the high school team. When Weinke left in the spring of 2015 to be the quarterbacks coach of the St. Louis Rams, Kevin Wright, a respected scholastic coach with experience in Indiana, Oklahoma and Kentucky, replaced him. It was Wright who hired Goganious as the academy's defensive coordinator and linebackers coach in mid-March to replace Donnie Abraham, a former NFL cornerback with 10 years of high school coaching experi- ence who had left a month earlier to be- come a defensive assistant at Illinois. "I heard about the opportunity and I reached out to Coach Wright," Goganious said on the telephone recently from his permanent home in the Washington, D.C., area. "I sent him my information, my resume and my coaching biography. I flew down for an interview and went through the whole gamut and process, in- terviewing with [human resources], the administration, Coach Wright and the coaching staff, and they offered me the job that day. I flew back, had a discussion with my family, and I took it. "I had heard about IMG and the acad- emy but I didn't get a chance to see the fa- cilities until I was down there on the interview. It's one of the best football programs in the country and has devel- oped and grown over the last four or five years. When I saw the facilities and the schedule with nationally televised games that we have and the opportunities for the kids who come from around the world – we now have a kid from Australia – I knew it was a unique coaching experience that I wanted to be part of." Seven other assistant coaches comprise the football staff, and they have a diver- sity of experiences, from the NFL and college to high school. Their coaching ex- pertise helps attract scholarship offers, like the one from Penn State that brought wide receiver K.J. Hamler to campus in January as an early enrollee in the 2017 recruiting class. Hamler is originally from the Detroit area, and prior to transferring to IMG Academy for his senior season he was a standout at Orchard Lake St. Mary's, the same high school that pro- duced the Nittany Lions' All-America wide receiver Allen Robinson, as well as former quarterback Rob Bolden. One rating service claimed that 22 of IMG's football graduates in 2017, includ- ing 12 five- and four-star recruits, would have been the No. 5 collegiate class in the country if they had all gone to the same school. Tennessee reportedly offered 20 scholarships to IMG Academy players over a three-year period. Incidentally, that Australian player Goganious men- tioned is 17-year-old Daniel Faalele, a 6- foot-9, 395-pound offensive tackle who had never played football or even watched a game before entering the academy last August. Faalele has already received of- fers from Michigan and LSU. There is at least one other IMG Acad- emy grad playing for Penn State, but in baseball. Willie Burger is a sophomore in- OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS H I S T O R Y G Hard-hitting PSU alum Keith Goganious restarts his coaching career at IMG Academy

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