by two outstanding Top 100 Golf Instructors. In
our Academics, we have two wonderful but very
different school partners, the Montverde Academy
in Florida and the Heritage Academy in South
Carolina. Montverde is internationally recognized
as being a top educational institution very
supportive of sports, with their basketball, soccer,
baseball and tennis all U.S. national champions. It
has more than doubled in size, and prestige since
we began to partner with them twelve years ago
and now have almost 1,500 students. In contrast,
Heritage Academy is a unique school in only
supporting students with a passion for golf, tennis,
swimming, rowing, dance, music, etc. Voted the
top island in the USA, Hilton Head is a perfect
place to vacation or raise children, therefore no
surprise that there are two top tennis academies,
two top golf academies and other academies that
inspire excellence in students. Small and intimate,
principally serving the latter high school years,
Heritage Academy tends to graduate about 40
students a year in contrast to Montverde graduating
classes in excess of 200 students.
Although I love golf and have experience as a
teacher in a boarding school, I have found that
my passion is for the Boarding element of our
product. Safeguarding and catering for our
students is obviously a serious and challenging
responsibility, but I have found that we have the
most extraordinary “peer group”. Based on the
logic that if one challenges oneself to achieve
excellence in any activity, one develops character
through the needed perseverance, grit and
determination. Although maybe biased, I see golf
as the best of the passion activities for developing
character and therefore, by deduction, we have the
best character peer group one can imagine. I don’t
have vast experience of other peer groups, but I
am immensely proud and impressed by our peer
group, validating my expectations. Most of the
character and leadership happens in the everyday
actions of our students, inspired by our staff, but
we also follow the Habitudes character program for
7