08-25-2012, 12:49 PM
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Rookie
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Eastern Christian Academy in MD
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/201...use/index.html
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Eastern Christian was established six months ago, and with less than three weeks until the start of the academic school year, 54 students are enrolled in grades six through 12. Forty-six are boys, and 46 are on the football team. The staff includes four teachers, a nurse, a minister and seven football coaches. The running backs and defensive backs coach is the director of operations, the de facto principal. Trainers are contracted from the outside, but last week a teacher and a coach filled those roles. Eastern Christian draws students from Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but it does not have a permanent campus yet, with founder and financial backer David Sills IV considering three sites in Elkton, Md. At one end of the spectrum is a sparkling 141,000-square-foot office building, previously occupied by a plastics company, set amid 90 acres dotted with white-tailed deer. At the other end is a 6,000-square-foot storefront in a strip mall that includes a barbershop and a tattoo parlor. |
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Most of them were once Red Lions, before they left Red Lion Christian Academy in Bear, Del., last January. Strictly speaking, Eastern Christian is not even a school but rather a club, with members who attend an online private school called National Connections Academy. "There is a lot of confusion," says Steven Guttentag, president of Baltimore-based Connections Learning, which is the parent company of National Connections. "Eastern Christian is not a school. It's a football training program that provides a site. National Connections Academy is the school. They're our team." Connections Education counts more than 45,000 students among its accredited private and public schools. Its students include everyone from prodigies at New York City's prestigious Juilliard School of Music to Olympic hopefuls, but Eastern Christian represents the company's first foray into team sports. "It's a whole new world for us," says Guttentag. "We're going up against the establishment to get everybody comfortable with it." |
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