PPA is thrilled to announce a new partnership that will serve as a wonderful resource to our community with Evolving Athlete Academy, created and operated by Jen Hoy and Luke Bunder.
Evolving Athlete Academy’s mission is to help middle and high school student athletes to overcome performance anxiety, build genuine confidence and develop important life skills so that they can reach their fullest potential and live extraordinary, happy lives. We highly recommend them, and believe that their approach and the tools they teach will be of great benefit to the many amazing youth athletes and their parents in our programs.
The connection between PPA and Evolving Athlete Academy goes back to our very own Annie Worden, Director of Premier Soccer, all the way to her playing days on the big stage with the Chicago Red Stars, where she shared the field with Jen Hoy.
Jen is a 7-year professional soccer player, Princeton grad and Certified Integrative Health Practitioner with experience playing with the U-23 Women's National Team. Luke Bender, co-creator and operator of Evolving Athlete Academy alongside Jen, is a retired pro boxer, certified in Neuro Linguistic Programming, Time Line Therapy™, Integrative Nutrition Health Coaching (IIN) and he is currently studying Neuro Semantics and positive psychology. Together they run Evolving Athlete Academy, which takes a big picture approach to helping student-athletes to build genuine confidence, accomplish their goals, and actualize their highest and best performance.
They most commonly help student-athletes who are struggling with performance anxiety, self-doubt, and low confidence, but also help athletes who simply want to take their sports and academic performance to the next level. Our entire goal here at PPA is to build pathways forward to higher levels of competition. We are constantly looking for new and better ways to accomplish this goal, and this partnership gives us the opportunity to better support our athletes off the field so they can be more successful on it. We are beyond excited for this opportunity for our players and parents.
To give you a sense of what this partnership can offer, Coach Jen and Coach Luke will be doing a workshop for us each month. There is no cost to attend for PPA members. Here are the 3 workshops happening over the next 3 months:
March’s workshop occurred last Sunday. The topic was "The 5 Crucial Mistakes That Parents Most Often Miss That Can Affect Their Children for the Rest of Their Lives."
To download the replay, GO HERE.
The second workshop is on Sunday, April 30th and it's called "How Parents Can Help Their Athletes to Have an Outstanding Performance At Their Next College ID Camp."
For details and to register, GO HERE.
The third workshop is on Sunday, May 21st: "Turning Performance Anxiety into High Performance: How to Develop High Performance Self Talk."
For details and to register, GO HERE.
Please email Jen at support@evolvingathleteacademy.com with any questions.
This partnership announcement comes just weeks after PPA announced its partnership with Trace, an innovative player recording and tracking platform. Annie Worden noted, "I believe this partnership with Trace is a game-changer for us. It gives us access to cutting-edge technology that will help us to improve our coaching, strengthen our player development, and create a more engaging and connected experience for our players and families. We're going to roll it out with a few teams this spring, and then plan to launch it 100% going into next year." Read more of that announcement here.
These are certainly exciting times as we continue to make headway toward providing the best competitive-club experience in the DMV-area. Headed into the Spring Season, PPA is looking to build on a very successful Winter Season. More to come!