Podcast: Inside the vision of Masters Academy International with John Carroll

John Carroll is the basketball sporting director at Masters Academy International, which opens next fall.

A “disruptor” to prep school basketball is coming to Massachusetts next fall with the opening of Masters Academy International, and John Carroll has his fingerprints all over it.

Carroll, the former longtime head coach at Northfield Mount Hermon, stepped away in 2022 and pursued other basketball ventures. He’s currently the “basketball architect” at Newman, and now he’s helping build the next chapter of prep school athletics in New England. MAI – a private $83.8 million multi-sports academy – has broken ground in Stow, Mass., and Carroll will be the basketball program’s sporting director.

MAI has aspirations to be the “IMG of the North,” its founder Peter Masters said in a story published by The Boston Globe in August, referring to IMG Academy in Florida. They hope it’s a destination for the best athletes who are looking for a different prep school experience with a unique focus on their sport.

Carroll joined the HoopWise Podcast for one of the first public discussions about MAI’s vision. The conversation explores how he found out about the project, his role with the basketball program and how it will be a game-changer for prep school basketball.

REACTION: Our initial takeaways on what MAI means for New England

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Highlights

How intimidating can MAI be to traditional prep schools?

Carroll: “I don’t use that word or that phrase lightly that I was afraid of a performance institute coming to New England, because I know what that can offer. As a prep school coach — in the (Globe) article we talk about Cooper Flagg, and there was a limit to what I could offer him, and here there won’t be a limit. There’s only so far you can go. You’re essentially giving them two years – using that math, you’re doubling up the opportunity to improve in your sport by two, and exponentially – that’s every day. There’s more improvement every day and exponentially that’s just an enormous number, the amount of impact that can have on a student-athlete in his experience as a person who’s passionate about their sport. I think you’re going to see dramatic improvement on the skill side, on the competitive side, on strength, on mental training. It’s just going to be exponential because every hour they get more just adds to the previous hour they just had. So I think it’s a dramatic impact on what is offered athletically.”

As someone who knows the culture of NEPSAC schools, do you think the existence of MAI will force NEPSAC to change some of those rules, regarding out-of-season coaching, regarding three sports, regarding time in the gym, or do you think a lot of them are so old and traditional that they’re not really going to want to change?

Carroll: “I’ve had experience making presentations and proposals to NEPSAC and that didn’t really get much room to operate. I think the really high-end schools with large enrollments, large endowment, tradition, they don’t need to really make a move athletically in order to survive. They’re going to be fine. Exeter and Deerfield, they’re going to last another 100 years. It’s the schools on the other end that really need help with the enrollment and I think you’re seeing it in college. … Some of these schools really rely on athletics to help with enrollment, and at some point, NEPSAC is going to have to make a decision. Are we here to support all of our people or are we just going to hold on to what we’ve done traditionally, and not necessarily consider what the impact of enrollment is on the athletics side for all these individual schools? We all know what the schools are – there are 20 of them that need athletics to survive and help with enrollment.

“I’m not sure what NEPSAC is going to do. My experiences with them and the proposals we’ve made, there’s been a little bit of room. But NEPSAC AAA, for example, used to be 100 percent aligned with colleges. We had the same start date, we had the same rules — well that’s gone away. NEPSAC AAA is not aligned with college anymore, so I think there’s decisions that NEPSAC has to make. But whether they respond or not respond to what MAI is doing, I don’t know, but they’re going to have to do something, for sure.”

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