Will Jones
Photo courtesy of ICL Academy
In a cramped classroom in suburban America, a talented young athlete stares at the clock. She has Olympic dreams, a rigorous training schedule that demands 30 hours a week, and a traditional school system that treats her ambitions as an inconvenience. Across town, a gifted young entrepreneur is building a tech startup that’s already generating revenue, but his guidance counselor keeps telling him to focus on getting into college instead.
For decades, these students had two choices: abandon their passions or compromise their education. Then Kirk Spahn decided there had to be a third option.
Why Traditional Schools Fail Passionate Students
ICL Academy, founded by Spahn in 2016, isn’t playing the traditional private school game. While legacy institutions compete over who has the oldest buildings and the most manicured lawns, ICL is building something fundamentally different: a scalable operating system for the future of education, designed to serve not hundreds, but tens of thousands of students worldwide.
“We are not aiming to join the ranks of private schools that measure success by how much they can charge,” Spahn explains. “We’re building a platform designed to transform, and democratize, private education on a global scale.”
It’s an audacious vision, and it’s working. What began as a targeted solution for elite young athletes who needed academic flexibility has rapidly evolved into the world’s #1 passion-based online education platform, serving students across athletics, performing arts, content creation, entrepreneurship, technology, and other high-commitment pursuits.
Photo courtesy of ICL Academy
The Founder Behind ICL Academy
Kirk Spahn isn’t new to educational innovation, he’s been at the forefront of it for nearly three decades. As founder of Dwight Global Online School and Chairman of the Dwight Schools, Spahn was pioneering digital education through Schoolmaster.net when most educators were still debating whether students should be allowed to use calculators. He also founded the globally lauded Institute for Civic Leadership (ICL Foundation), consistently focusing on making education more relevant, flexible, and impact-driven.
ICL Academy represents the culmination of that career—a platform, not just an institution, built on a simple but powerful insight: the highest engagement, mastery, and long-term outcomes occur when academics are intentionally integrated with a student’s passion. At ICL, academics and passion aren’t trade-offs. They’re mutually reinforcing.
Learning from World-Class Champions, Not Just Teachers
This philosophy has attracted not just students, but an unprecedented roster of world-class mentors. And these aren’t symbolic ambassadors who lend their names for marketing purposes—they’re active contributors who bring lived experience and real-world perspective into the learning process. Their insights are woven directly into ICL’s curriculum, allowing students to hear from their heroes at the close of weekly lessons—reinforcing how their coursework connects meaningfully to their passions, ambitions, and future goals.
“I love what ICL stands for,” says Kerri Walsh Jennings, ICL Champion and Olympic Gold Medalist. “I want to align with people who share the fundamental values of living a good life, being a good person, and being excellent in what you do. That’s why I’m so proud to be associated with ICL because that’s what our next generation deserves.”
The list reads like a who’s who of global excellence: Novak Djokovic, Bode Miller, Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Freston, Kerri Walsh Jennings, Steve Nash, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Monica Seles, and many others. For students, this creates inspiration and relevance. For newcomers eyeing the education space, it represents a powerful brand and retention moat that’s nearly impossible to replicate.
“The reason I love working with ICL is because they’re creating Champions not only in their industry of choice, but also in life,” reflects ICL Champion and tennis legend Monica Seles. “I think the two are so important and I think a Champions definition can be different for all of us. But to be a Champion, it takes dedication, hard work, and also focus. ICL brings me full circle and gives me a platform to do my real life’s work, which is to inspire the next generation.”
Photo courtesy of ICL Academy
AI-Powered Personalization with a Human Touch
ICL’s approach isn’t about rejecting traditional education, it’s about re-engineering it for an AI-driven, personalized future. The academy respects the rigor and credibility that matter while refusing to perpetuate the inefficiencies that don’t.
Rather than forcing students into one-size-fits-all curricula tied to legacy brand names, ICL delivers customized academic pathways aligned to each student’s goals and real-world pursuits. Students complete core academic requirements while applying learning immediately in passion-aligned contexts: athletes integrate academics with performance science and leadership; creators study media, storytelling, and digital strategy; entrepreneurs engage in applied business, innovation, and product development.
This integrated approach mirrors how mastery works in sport and life: learning is relevant, applied, and dynamic.
The platform leverages AI-driven personalization and advanced analytics, layered on top of live teachers, seminars, mentoring, and community. Technology enhances rather than replaces the human element, preserving what matters most while dramatically increasing scale, flexibility, and customization.
The Operations Team Scaling Excellence
While Spahn provides the vision, Chief Operating Officer Dayton Hansen brings the operational rigor that’s enabled ICL’s rapid scaling without sacrificing its personalized, mission-driven culture.
With more than two decades in online education, Hansen understands what makes students thrive. As a former three-sport high school athlete and collegiate baseball player who later coached at the high school and college levels, he brings a coach’s mentality to educational operations: meet students where they are, provide structure and support, and help them develop both skills and character.
“When students are supported academically and encouraged to pursue their passions outside the classroom—whether in sports, the arts, or entrepreneurship—they are more engaged, more fulfilled, and more prepared for life,” Hansen explains. Under his leadership, ICL has led initiatives across admissions, marketing, operations, partnerships, and student success, always focused on creating world-class opportunities for students.
Hansen’s team reflects ICL’s commitment to excellence. The staff is drawn from leading global edtech organizations, top universities, and high-performing academic institutions, combining deep pedagogical expertise with modern product, platform, and operational experience.
Photo courtesy of ICL Academy
The Academic Vision Behind ICL’s Success
At the helm of ICL’s academic vision is Head of School Avery McGlenn, whose nearly two decades in teaching, coaching, and counseling across independent boarding, charter, and virtual schools have made her uniquely qualified to lead an institution that refuses to treat students as interchangeable parts. McGlenn brings institutional knowledge and strategic expertise that continues to position ICL as one of the best online private schools in the world. She has guided countless students and scholar-athletes through college admissions and recruiting, designed robust academic programming, and mentored teachers in creating spaces of impact, care, and belonging.
“Transformational academic experiences begin with knowing and honoring each individual student’s unique background, strengths, goals, and identity,” McGlenn explains. “We create personalized paths for reaching those goals, and we walk those paths with compassion and empathy alongside our students and families.”
It’s a philosophy that permeates every aspect of ICL’s academic model—and one that traditional schools, constrained by rigid structures and overwhelming student-to-counselor ratios, simply cannot replicate.
Beyond Admissions: Learning to Thrive in University
The results speak for themselves. ICL students are being admitted to elite universities across the country, including Columbia, Brown, University of Chicago, USC, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Duke, and Stanford. But what’s perhaps more telling than where ICL students go is how prepared they are once they get there. ICL’s once-per-week live seminar model, combined with weekly self-guided work, mirrors the university learning structure—a far cry from the traditional 8am-3pm school day with back-to-back classes. Students learn to manage their time, take ownership of their learning, and engage deeply with material on their own schedule.
This isn’t just preparation for college admissions; it’s preparation for college success. ICL graduates arrive on campus already fluent in the independence, self-direction, and intellectual engagement that overwhelm so many freshmen. They’re equipped not just to attend elite universities, but to thrive there—and to emerge as fully engaged leaders in college and in life.
How ICL Solves the Socialization Problem
One of the most persistent criticisms of online education is the socialization question. ICL hasn’t just addressed this concern—they’ve reimagined what socialization can look like for 21st-century global citizens.
Through diverse clubs and interest groups, ICL brings high-performing students together not just within their classes, but from every corner of the world. These aren’t the forced social interactions of a traditional cafeteria, where cliques form and bullying thrives. At ICL, bullying simply doesn’t exist. Students engage with like-minded peers who share a champion mentality, making authentic friendships often easier to form, not harder.
The result? ICL parents consistently report that their students now have more time for the things they love—which, in addition to training and passion pursuits, includes spending time with friends and family. Consider the hours reclaimed: no commute to and from school, no dead time between classes, no sitting through instruction that’s too slow or too fast. Traditional schools are filled with inefficiencies that steal time from what actually matters.
“My daughter used to spend two hours a day just getting to and from school,” one ICL parent explains. “Now she trains, excels academically, and actually has dinner with us every night. She’s happier, less stressed, and more connected to our family than she’s been in years.”
Photo courtesy of ICL Academy
Better Preparation for the Future of Work
Here’s the point that traditional educators don’t want to confront: in a world where the future of work is global, remote, and hybrid, learning in a virtual school like ICL isn’t just an alternative—it’s a better training ground for reality.
Today’s students will enter a workforce where they’ll collaborate across time zones, communicate through digital platforms, manage their own schedules, and be judged on outcomes rather than face time. They’ll need to be self-directed, technologically fluent, and comfortable building relationships without physical proximity.
Which model better prepares them for that future? Sitting in rows in a brick building, raising their hand for permission to use the bathroom? Or learning to thrive in the exact digital, flexible, globally-connected environment they’ll inhabit as adults?
ICL students aren’t just getting an education—they’re developing the competencies that will define success in the 21st century. They’re learning to manage complex schedules, meet deadlines without constant supervision, collaborate virtually with peers worldwide, and balance multiple high-level commitments simultaneously. These aren’t soft skills. They’re the hard skills of modern professional life.
Democratizing Access to Elite Education
Perhaps most revolutionary is ICL’s commitment to scale. Traditional elite private schools are artificially constrained by geography, classroom size, and exclusivity. ICL’s platform model allows it to serve vastly more students without compromising quality—fundamentally democratizing access to world-class education, mentorship, and opportunity.
This isn’t about making education cheaper by making it worse. It’s about using technology to make exceptional education accessible to students who, in previous generations, would have been forced to choose between their dreams and their diploma.
The young athlete training for the Olympics, the musician recording an album, the entrepreneur building a startup, the actor auditioning for roles, they all deserve an education that supports rather than sabotages their ambitions. ICL makes that possible not for a privileged few, but for tens of thousands of students worldwide.
Education That Finally Fits the Student
As traditional education faces mounting criticism for its inability to adapt to modern needs, ICL Academy offers more than just an alternative. It offers a glimpse of what education can look like when you start with a fundamentally different question—not “How do we make students fit our system?” but “How do we build a system that unleashes human potential?”
Under Kirk Spahn’s visionary leadership and Dayton Hansen’s operational excellence, ICL is proving that you can maintain academic rigor while honoring student passion. You can leverage technology without losing the human touch. You can scale dramatically without sacrificing personalization. And you can prepare students not for the education system of the past, but for the world they’ll actually inherit. In less than a decade, ICL Academy has become the #1 school for tennis players, the #1 school for golfers, and the #1 school for equestrians.
For the students who don’t fit the traditional mold—which, it turns out, is most of them—that changes everything.