To jump off the new year to a strong start, five BSM sports teams started up their winter training at Fortis academy.

Fortis academy is a training facility with a 4000 square foot gym. The academy also does leadership and character development work, nutrition seminars, and a lot of hockey camps. It was founded by BSM alum Josh Levine in 2009. He has trained athletes in all sports, including football, hockey, cheerleading, soccer, lacrosse, basketball and rugby.

Lavine attended BSM his freshman year of high school and met coach Ken Pauly, the boys hockey coach at BSM. When he returned from Washington DC, he connected with coach Pauly again in order to start working with the hockey program. “I texted and emailed with him and said hey, I’m coming back and want to connect and so that’s kind of where it started. From there, I started working with the BSM boys hockey team, and it’s gone from that to working with five or six BSM sports teams,” Lavine said.

BSM has partnered with Fortis for five years full time and before that it was just a summer thing. Each BSM team reaches out to fortis individually if they want to set up a program. Then, Lavine and the other trainers at fortis create training programs specific to each team and sport. “Every sport has a different program even like boys and girls lacrosse teams have different programs. It depends on many factors, the time they train, the equipment available, sometimes we are able to go on the turf, sometimes we’re not, or the numbers in the groups vary. So some of the groups are smaller, some are bigger. We create custom plans based on the numbers and how the group is based on what strength they need to work on or kind of where they’re at,” Lavine said.

Right now, BSM boys and girls lacrosse, boys and girls hockey, and baseball are all training at Fortis academy. They are tested on a regular basis to see if the work they are doing is helping make progress on the field or rink. This is seen on the training data, such as the 20/40 yard dash and the vertical jump test. “We take data from run tests and then we look at vertical jumps. We can see like, if we see an athlete make a pretty good percentage increase like as an example on vertical jump if they go up 20 plus percent. We know that in their sport, they’re going to be super, like a lot more explosive and they’ll have a pretty good transformation on the field,” Lavine said.

Another big part of training at Fortis is the culture; the team building aspect is very important and fun for athletes. When everyone is together and working hard toward the same goal of getting better, then when the season rolls around, everyone’s a little bit better and that will lead to greater success. “I love Fortis because we are all together and we can have fun with everyone while still getting better and ready for the season,” sophomore Kate Walesch said.