In this episode of Puck Academy, host Jason Jacobs speaks with Peter Masters, the longtime Owner and Program Director of the Junior Bruins, a club hockey program based in Marlborough, MA. Running the program since 1998, Peter spent 17 seasons as head coach of the Junior Bruins’ top Junior Team (NCDC) before shifting into full-time program leadership, overseeing all Junior, full season Midget teams, and the half season “Little Bruins” teams. These teams have captured national championships and league titles, and hundreds of alums have gone on to play Division I hockey, represent the US national team, and compete in the NHL.He also founded the Beantown Classic tournament series and served on the USPHL executive committee for 8 years. A Boston College graduate (97) and former varsity hockey player, appearing in over 130 games and a member of the 1994 Beanpot Championship team. Alongside his brother, Chris Masters, Peter’s most recent endeavor is co-founding Masters Academy International, which they describe as New England’s first and only academy combining elite sports and top-tier academics to prepare leaders ready for the future – excelling in sport, school, and life. This discussion delves into Masters’ journey in the sport, the Junior Bruins origin story and evolution, the rise of club teams in New England, and some of the ways the game has evolved since he first got into it several decades ago. It also unpacks the Masters Academy International origin story, it’s reason for being, the twists and turns they have gone through to get it off the ground, what makes it special, and what kinds of students would be the best fit to attend.
In this episode of Puck Academy, host Jason Jacobs talks with Peter Masters, owner and program director of the Junior Bruins and co-founder of Masters Academy International. Peter shares insights from his extensive experience in player development and club hockey, detailing the growth of the Junior Bruins, the evolution of youth hockey in New England, and the challenges and triumphs of founding New England's first academy combining elite sports and top-tier academics. He also discusses the significance of individual skill, player IQ, and the role of family in athletic development. The episode delves into the ambitious vision behind Masters Academy International, its comprehensive facilities, and the rigorous planning and partnerships that are bringing this pioneering school to life.
00:00 Introduction to Puck Academy
00:18 Meet Peter Masters: Junior Bruins Legacy
01:51 The Evolution of Junior Hockey
02:28 Masters Academy International: A New Venture
03:12 Peter's First Podcast Experience
04:34 Growing Up with Hockey: Peter and Chris
09:07 The Origin Story of the Junior Bruins
14:49 The Junior Hockey Experience
17:46 Player Development and Early Specialization
22:43 Family Influence in Hockey
25:30 Balancing Push and Passion in Youth Sports
30:41 The Changing Landscape of Youth Hockey
31:50 The Role of Club Teams and Tournaments
36:23 The State of Hockey Today
38:39 Development Inside and Outside the Team
41:10 Skill vs. IQ in Modern Hockey
46:23 Reflecting on Past Hockey Experiences
47:50 Transition to Building a Youth Hockey Academy
48:26 Challenges in Recruiting and Competing with Prep Schools
49:27 Conceptualizing a New Prep School Model
55:51 Finding the Right Property for the Academy
01:01:07 Securing Funding and Overcoming Obstacles
01:14:00 Building the Academy: Facilities and Staff
01:17:20 Recruitment Strategies and Enrollment Goals
01:21:54 Final Thoughts and Encouragement for Prospective Students
[Jason Jacobs] (0:00 - 3:10)
Welcome to Puck Academy, a show about how hockey players grow on and off the ice. I'm Jason Jacobs, the host. And each week I talk with players, coaches, and experts shaping the future of player development.
Today's guest is Peter Masters. Peter is the longtime owner and program director of the Junior Bruins, a club hockey program based in Marlboro, Massachusetts. He's run that program since 1998 and spent 17 seasons as head coach of their top junior team in the NCDC before shifting into full-time program leadership, overseeing all junior, full-season major teams, and the half-season little Bruins teams.
These teams have captured national championships, league titles, and hundreds of alums have gone on to play Division I hockey, represent the US national team, and compete in the NHL. Peter also founded the Beantown Classic Tournament Series and served on the US-PHL Executive Committee for eight years. He's a Boston College graduate, former varsity hockey player there, appearing in over 130 games and a member of the 1994 Beanpot Championships team.
Peter's latest project is an initiative lead and co-founder of a school called Masters Academy International alongside his brother Chris. Masters Academy International is New England's first and only academy, combining elite sports and top-tier academics to prepare leaders ready for the future, excelling in sport, school, and life. They're based in Stowe, Massachusetts.
They're opening in fall of 2026 and we'll welcome middle school, upper school, and postgraduate co-ed day and boarding students. Now, I was excited for this one because the Junior Bruins are a legendary program, and so it's a fascinating look into the history of the program, how it came to be, how it's evolved over the years, the whys behind the decisions that they made along the way. We also talk about how the games evolved under their feet during this time, the rise of club hockey, how the landscape has changed, how the skill sets have improved, how specialization has happened earlier, and the implications as players and families are navigating the development path.
And, of course, we talk about Masters Academy International, how it came to be the eight-year grueling journey, some of the twists, turns, setbacks, and fortuitous opportunities that came about along the way. And we also talk about what to expect from it, the value proposition of attending, and how to think about academies in general and having everything under one roof versus lugging your kid around to everything a la carte, which is what a lot of people, including me, do today. At any rate, I really enjoyed this one.
I'm appreciative to Peter for making the time, and I hope you enjoy it. Peter, welcome to the show.
[Peter Masters] (3:10 - 3:12)
Hey, Jason, thanks for having me.
[Jason Jacobs] (3:12 - 3:16)
Thanks for coming. Your first ever podcast, I'm told.
[Peter Masters] (3:16 - 3:25)
It is, it is. I see so many other people doing it. My brother's done a couple already, and I guess I get my first day here, so very excited.
[Jason Jacobs] (3:26 - 3:42)
Yeah, I told you before we started recording that I've never met your brother, but I listened to an episode that he did last night, I think, was one of his golfing buddies or something, but it was called like beers and careers or something. I don't know if you saw that one.
[Peter Masters] (3:42 - 3:44)
He gets a buddy from his club that he did it with.
[Jason Jacobs] (3:44 - 4:10)
You know, he didn't give the sanitized version. He, you know, like, like, like the parts of the process, as you guys are getting this thing off the ground, that he had a greenish tint. Like he just said, like, like, that crap was hard, you know?
Or like, we got it, you know, like, we got a million nose or it's, you know, like, we, like, I don't know, I just appreciate. That's my style too, is just like, like, I, I just kind of have nothing to hide and wear it on my sleeve. And I appreciated that about your brother.
[Peter Masters] (4:10 - 4:34)
In private, we, everyone speaks a little differently than they do in public. You never know how these things are going to get cut up and sliced and used for you against you, all that kind of stuff. So hopefully I can be, you know, as open as he is in all of this.
I think I'm a little guarded in general, but yeah, he had a really interesting one. I thought people who are trying to learn about our process and what we're doing is definitely a fun lesson if you're in the car. That's for sure.
[Jason Jacobs] (4:35 - 4:52)
Well, I wasn't planning to start here, but that makes me think of a good starting point, which is you obviously grew up with your brother. You played hockey with your brother in college. You've been business partners with your brother for a long time.
And now you're doing Masters Academy with your brother. How are you guys the same or different? And who does what?
[Peter Masters] (4:52 - 7:48)
Chris and I grew up just 18 months apart. And so hockey was, you know, a major part of our lives. So we spent some time on teams together growing up and then played in college together for two years.
Back in the late 90s, I finished in 1999, had a cup of coffee in the East Coast League. Got three months into that, realized that I wanted to do coaching. It had changed my life.
It took me from a player in high school that no one really wanted me to after two years of playing junior hockey and having an incredible coach to, you know, having all kinds of college, you know, big time division one college interest. And so I knew I wanted to do that kind of the rest of my life. So I got to December after my after graduating from BC and looked at my coach in East Coast League and said, Hey, I want to go start recruiting my team for next year and jump into kind of the club.
I love hockey world Christmas two years behind me. He finished as well in 99 playing the East Coast League picked up a bunch of concussions. And that was having tons of headaches and said, This is crazy for 425 bucks a week.
You know, plus a couple meals to continue. So we've been partners ever since 2000 together. So we're going on, you know, close to 26 years.
We've had quite frankly an incredible partnership. A lot of times family members don't kind of work well together and it goes left, right and center, but we've been had a, you know, a fantastic kind of working relationship. The last 26 years he in general does kind of everything 16 and below in our programming and I'll do 16 and above.
So 16 to 20 year olds, whether it's tournaments or camps or teams, it's kind of been spread right down the middle. When this idea kind of hit us eight or nine years ago. I took the baton and, you know, ran with it.
Well, Chris picked up a bigger piece of our kind of existing business and held the fort down while I, you know, was spending, you know, sometimes, you know, 50 hours a week working on this. And so he's been an incredible partner to have. You also love having, you know, someone who's family as well, because, you know, we're all their loyalties lie and you're both kind of pulling for each other.
And there's never been a fear of any of us kind of leaving each other and going off and doing other things. We've had opportunities to coach, you know, in college and some pro stuff along the way. And it's really, it's an amazing feeling to know that your partner is not going to walk out the door on you.
And you can kind of hold hands together all the way through and create a business and, you know, a income for your family. And you got someone to commiserate with and someone to celebrate with that is this happy for you for success than, you know, anyone else could be. So, um, brief history in us, but it's been, you know, perfect, quite frankly, partnership.
[Jason Jacobs] (7:48 - 8:13)
And it's great that you've found a way to, to make it work. I mean, there's a, there's a whole department at Babson College that's just focused on family businesses. So, like family business in itself is like its own, its own beast.
So I've never done it, but, but I, I can imagine that, that it's different than if you're just like, you know, working with somebody that you were coworkers with, for a few years or something.
[Peter Masters] (8:14 - 9:07)
Well, look, it gives you opportunity to call them at any time of the day on weekends, talk on vacations, talk at family dinners. You know, all of that stuff without kind of interfering with what, you know, what they're calling today, work life balance, right? That's just, you know, there's just.
Hey, five o'clock, our phone's off. No, no, no, I'll call you at 10 o'clock. And, you know, we need to talk about something.
We need to work on something where I have an idea. So that's been great. And I think also along the way, a lot of those family businesses, you know, sometimes, you know, one person carries more of the weight than the other, and there's jealousies or, you know, there's, you know, hey, I do more, I should be paid more.
That's never happened with Chris Ryan, you know, for five, 10 years, I might be, you know, carrying a bigger load and then it flips for a few years and he's doing it and there's never been an issue about, you know, how you, you know, kind of chop up how you get paid and you know, how it works within the business. So it's really been easy.
[Jason Jacobs] (9:07 - 10:05)
I've heard from Chris's episode and I read a bit about your dad and about the origin story of the Junior Bruins. It sounds like an amazing story from what I can, and he sounds like an amazing man. From what I can gather, you guys grew up in Massachusetts playing, you know, I grew up in Massachusetts playing Massachusetts youth hockey.
I played for my town. Then I played for my public high school. Then I fell into D three.
Like, I just kind of did it the way it was done back then, right? And as you certainly know, it's done very differently today. But back then, you did something that I don't know anyone else from around here that did what you did, which is you went to play juniors and actually it was seen success that you had in juniors that led your dad to say, oh crap, like, we need to bring that model back to, you know, here to New England.
How did all that happen? Like, how did you guys get into hockey in the first place? How did you end up in juniors and how did the Junior Bruins get going in 30 seconds or less?
[Peter Masters] (10:07 - 10:09)
30 seconds. I won't be able to do it just that.
[Jason Jacobs] (10:10 - 10:12)
I'm just kidding about the 30 seconds.
[Peter Masters] (10:12 - 14:48)
Yeah, you got two pieces, right? My father, then how the whole hockey thing developed around here. Look, he grew up in Dorchester and Everett didn't graduate from high school, went into the army.
Got married to my mother, moved to California with 60 bucks and a mattress. He tells a great story about how he was working for a computer company for six months. She was a teacher.
He didn't get paid for six months, needed the money, the business then. He sent him a note on Thanksgiving. It was like a Western telegram saying, hey, we've gone bankrupt.
Sorry about the money. You're not going to get any of it. He was a guy who helped was commiserate with what he was owed, and he started his own computer company and retired at 54, you know, 25 years later.
And so that's the type of guy he was. He was an entrepreneur. I had no fear in kind of running his own business.
He was a Massachusetts guy who loved hockey, but growing up in the kind of very strict Italian family never got a chance to play sports. It was, you know, you're 13 years old. You're going to work and you're going to go to school and you're going to work.
And even you got to forget school, you're going to work like it's work. And so hockey was his passion. We got back to Massachusetts when I was four or five years old.
We got right into it. Went through kind of the normal track of some private schools at St. Sebastian's in Matinon and then graduated and I had no options. I was a non stay back senior.
So a lot of athletes stay back to gain that extra year. I had a cup of coffee for 30 minutes at Merrimack in Dartmouth on some visits where I think really I ended up there because someone called in a favor and said, hey, could you take the kid and show him around and then shut the door in his face and tell him he's got to get better. And so I graduated in 91.
It was the springtime. I was going on a kind of like a school trip in the spring for seniors on a cruise. We're all excited about it.
And there was an event in Chicago called the Chicago Showcase. It doesn't exist anymore. But it was like Team Mass versus Team New Hampshire versus Team Illinois and Team Minnesota.
And I made that team. And it was during this senior trip that I was going to take. And I said, well, Dad, I can't do it.
I'm going to party. I'm going on this cruise. He says, you're not going anywhere.
You have nothing. You have no place for next fall. You have a hockey tournament.
You're going. And so I went out to Chicago play this event, a guy by the name of Dave Morneville, who at the time was coaching the Omaha Lancers brought me and one of my teammates might send me into a hotel room and put a VHS VHS tape in and say, hey, we'd like you to come to Omaha. And the tape showed 6,000 fans screaming and cheering for hockey, which we'd never heard of junior hockey.
We didn't know about the USHL. No one from New England had gone at that time except the year before Kenny Jones from Somerville ended up in Madison, but no one knew. There was no internet at the time.
There's no newspapers. You didn't know where Kenny Jones had ended up. And so my father, I was scheduled to go to Lawrenceville as a PG played 24 games and go down to New Jersey, which was kind of an average.
You know, private school program in itself. And he just looked at me and said, this is 70 games. It's 110 practices with a real coach.
We are absolutely changing direction. And that's where you're going to end up. Well, that league had a draft.
And so Omaha was picking for Dubuque was picking second. And so they picked me ahead of it. And I ended up in Dubuque playing for a coach named Kerry Eats, who was one of the best coaches I've ever had.
And it took me from kind of a fringe division one player in a year and a half to, you know, quite frankly getting a chance to pick from, you know, some incredible colleges. So it was that development and the coaching and the level of competition and kind of the sole focus on the sport of hockey that got my father passionate about bringing it to the east. He took over running the junior Bruins, which was a junior team that started in 1991 combination of a guy by the name of Ted Kelly, who was coaching a Taver at the time and Joe Lyons, who was a full time scout for the Bruins.
They had been operating for a year. He took it over with a thought that, hey, maybe one day, this is something Peter and Chris could run when they finished playing. And so when I finished playing in 97, the junior Bruins are still waiting for me.
And I took it over as a 24 year old back in the spring of 98.
[Jason Jacobs] (14:49 - 15:03)
Now, in that year and a half that inflected your trajectory with the benefit of hindsight, what was it about that year and a half that enabled you to do that? And how much of that came from you versus came to came from what was around you?
[Peter Masters] (15:04 - 16:45)
Well, look, you need the building blocks. You need to be able to skate, handle pox. You have to have some toughness.
You have to be able to think the game really well, but I was just completely underdeveloped back in the 80s and early 90s in Massachusetts. There was no real fall hockey. You played New England College development on Saturday nights at Hangum.
That was one game a week. And then you went to your high school program, which started after Thanksgiving. You'd played 20 games.
You'd have 50 practices. And then you'd be done by the middle of March. And most of the top athletes, at least in hockey, Canada, Major, Junior or over Europe or the Midwest were all playing seven, eight months, right?
The USHL existed. We just didn't know it existed. Junior hockey existed.
We didn't know it existed. And so I was completely underdeveloped as an athlete at 17 years old. And I got put into a program that was 70 games.
It was 120 practices. It was with, you know, our junior team had, I think, 18 or the 22 or Division I players, three kids played in the National Hockey League on it. So the level of play was better.
Quite frankly, the coaching was better. The amount of time in the ice was better. The competition was better.
And you either just rise to the level and prove and catch up or you sink. And I swam, got my feet underneath me. And the first year and the second year blossomed into a player that Division I schools would be interested in.
But it was development coaching competition that did not exist in Massachusetts or New England at the time, other than a program here or two that was kind of misfits because they were great players, but they just stood alone as a one or two team entity in New England.
[Jason Jacobs] (16:45 - 17:38)
So I'm going to parrot back what I think I heard Chris say about the origin of the Junior Bruins and make sure I understand it right. And that will lead into a question. So what it sounded like was that when you guys started, it was with a juniors team that was a full season team for the older kids to bring that type of experience that you experienced to Massachusetts.
And then it sounded like the next step was, Hey, we can say, Hey, how you doing? Nice to meet you. Do you want to come play for us and try to like start from zero at that time?
Or we can get to know these kids and build relationships and trust and also be able to watch them and see who the best are earlier. And that led you guys to get more involved at the earlier level. So before I ask my question, do I have that right?
[Peter Masters] (17:38 - 17:39)
You do.
[Jason Jacobs] (17:39 - 17:58)
You guys are trying to get to know the best kids early so that you already know them and have the relationships and trust later. I guess my question is how much of who ends up the best kids later is recruiting and finding the best kids early in building relationships and trust versus development.
[Peter Masters] (17:58 - 19:39)
Look, you have to have an incredible piece of clay to develop, right? You can't take someone who is just learning to play hockey at 13 and 14 and can't skate and put them with the best coaches in the world and give them all kinds of ice time and expect them to develop into kind of high level players, right? So it's a combination of two things.
You know, one, you got to find a great piece of clay to work with. And then you then have to bring to the development kind of table all the stuff that they weren't getting other places. Ice time, ice time, ice time, off ice training, coaching, putting against them against great competition, creating great competition and practice, running practices and drills that kind of push high level development.
You know, look, there's a lot of coaches out there that you can give them an hour practice and there's a lot of standing around or they're just doing the wrong drills or they're also teaching the wrong things or they're concentrating on the wrong stuff. Some of them like to just get out there and blow a whistle and have a jacket and say, oh, I ran a practice today, but they're not really bearing down on, you know, what does this defenseman need and what does those forward group need and, you know, how does our power play work? There's 15 different ways to run a power play.
We just keep running the same thing over and over again that doesn't work. There's plenty of guys who just keep doing that where a great coach will change up. They'll watch video.
So you really need both. You need an incredible piece of clay to start with and then there are definitely coaches out there that separate themselves and are just better developers of talent over, you know, a seven month season than other people. And those coaches, you know, tend to be the most successful because the great pieces of clay find them because they want to be the best player that can be at the end of that kind of season.
[Jason Jacobs] (19:39 - 20:42)
As I make the rounds and I talk to different people that are well placed in the game, one narrative that I hear is like the best have a twinkle in their eye from the earliest days. And like if your kid was the best, you would know because like there was just always something special about them. And like, and if you look around out there, like if no one's like popping off the page and competing two birth years up and like right then like then like going there's going anywhere, right?
And then the other narrative is like, like who are we kidding anointing kids as elite when they're, you know, eight years old, 10 years old, 12 years old, like the best eight year olds aren't the best 10 year olds aren't the best 10 year olds aren't the best 15 year olds are and so like nobody knows and anyone that says they knows is is full of crap. Those seem to directly contradict each other. I guess how do you think about it and is that tension real?
[Peter Masters] (20:42 - 22:42)
Listen, I think they're both right to a certain level. In general, your first comment about, hey, you were the best six, seven, eight year old and then you're going to be the best 18, 19, 20 year old tends to be true, right? If you can skate and you can handle pucks and you can think the game and you're dominant at six, seven, eight years old and then you put the time in and you don't get derailed by, you know, another sport or, you know, size issues or or girls or drugs or drinking, you usually come out the other end of the funnel as the best.
Now, there are players who, for whatever reason, are not dominant at seven, eight years old but gained size. They're great athletes. They put more time into development.
They just didn't skate a lot as kind of younger, but a 12, 13, you know, get incredible passion for it and they got to pour themselves into it that absolutely can catch up and sometimes go pass those people. But in general, the best athletes at eight, nine years old and kids who can skate come out the other end as the top players. Now, what level does top mean?
If you're talking about NHL caliber players, yeah, look, Jack Eichl and Connor Garland were, you know, Frankie Vittrado. Those were kids who came through our program who were incredible and better than, you know, just about everyone at eight, nine years old and they put the time in and they're, you know, they developed to that point. They're playing professionally now and no one at those birth years was able to catch them and grow from, you know, hey, I'm here and they're like to do this.
Maybe get a little closer, but as this guy's getting better, so isn't that guy. So the margin still, you know, keeps separating. But, you know, there's always a kind of, you know, hero story of a kid who at 10 was just okay and all of a sudden he's a third round draft pick.
You know, that happens, but 250 players drafted a year, 90% of them were kind of in that top, you know, 5%, 3% kind of all the way along through kind of playing.
[Jason Jacobs] (22:43 - 23:10)
I don't have the data, you might have the data, but it seems like a large percentage, maybe even in hockey more in other sports of last names on the jerseys of top players are recognizable because they're, you know, one or both of their parents have, you know, played the game at a high level. Do you observe that as well? And if so, why do you think that is and how much of it is nature versus nurture?
[Peter Masters] (23:10 - 24:43)
Oh, listen, I think your observation is correct. Though there are plenty of, you know, former, you know, NHLers whose kids you never hear the name of, right? You just don't, but I think nature is a huge piece of it.
You know, these guys are incredible athletes. You know, they tend to, you know, marry high level, you know, partners, right, who have same, you know, passion for sport, right? And so mom's a great athlete as well.
And then you also have the nurture part of it that they know what it takes to become a great hockey player and that's starting skating by four years old, right? And they're able to get out there and work with them and teach them stride and crossovers and hand positioned. And, you know, as you're getting kind of those little, you know, corrections and, you know, being held accountable when you're seven, eight, nine years old in the car ride homes, you're getting this great feedback from a pro, right?
Who knows, you know, these are the things that you needed to fix in the game today or you didn't work hard enough or you're not driving the net properly. You're not winning loose puck battles. And I think pro athletes also hold their kids more accountable, you know, when it comes to that stuff and all those little things that you're getting at seven, eight, nine, ten years old, add up.
And a lot of, you know, parents who aren't in that world don't bring the same genetics and don't bring the same nurture, you know, to the, you know, kind of the development stack that those, that those people do.
[Jason Jacobs] (24:43 - 25:29)
For parents that hold their kids to high standards, there's different ways to frame it or look at it. One way to frame it and look at it is they hold their kids to high standards. They expect big things from them.
They instill rigor and work ethic and discipline and process and achieving mastery in something. And those are valuable life lessons regardless of how they project in a sport, right? Another way to frame it is, man, their kid doesn't even have agency yet.
And they're just anointing their kid elite and they're living vicariously through their kid and trying to make their kids something that their kids like might not even want to be, right? So, so like what's a healthy way to do it and what's an unhealthy way to do it from, from observing so many different kids and families go through the journey and, and playing such an active role in helping them.
[Peter Masters] (25:30 - 27:32)
Yeah, look, my father always said, you know, push your kids. They'll thank you later, right? There's a narrative amongst, you know, parents these days that, oh, just let him find his own way and they'll work it out.
And, you know, and, you know, an eight, nine, ten year old, they don't know the difference, right? They need to be held accountable. They need to be pushed.
And I think what he meant by saying they'll thank you later is when you achieve certain levels of success. Now, what level could that be? That could just be a great high school player for your local town, right?
You get to go out there for three years and you play a ton, you score a bunch of goals and you get the half the town out to watch you and you're never going to play in college, but you had an incredible high school career and it was a ton of fun, right? You'll look back and say, Hey, Dad, thanks for, thanks for pushing me. Or it could be someone who played in college or even pro.
I think the other piece you touched on is if your kid is not enjoying what he's doing and you're pushing him through it, you're making a mistake. Because whether it's hockey or something else, maybe it's wrestling or maybe it's baseball or maybe it's a sport you've never even done. He has to find something that she has to find something they really enjoy because you can only push them enough.
They're going to have to have it within themselves to do all the extras. And so if you stick with hockey, what are the extras? It's going out and shooting a thousand pucks a week or it's doing, you know, concentrating more at that skating school that really stinks, right?
It's terrible to do power skating and crossovers. And mom and dad cannot force you to do it. But if you have passion for it and you enjoy it, you're going to put the extra work in to kind of achieve more levels.
So I think for parents, I think it is appropriate to push them and hold them accountable, but hold them accountable and push them in things that they're really enjoying. And if it's not hockey, find something else. And even if it's not a sport, maybe it's music, maybe it's art, maybe it's theater.
But get a kid to a place that they really enjoy it and then push them through that kind of process.
[Jason Jacobs] (27:32 - 27:57)
One narrative I hear a lot is it's a long journey. You know, don't turn up the grind too much too fast because they're going to flame out and by the time it gets time to really grind, they're already going to be sick of it. Having the endurance to make it all the way through.
[Peter Masters] (27:59 - 30:41)
Yeah, I've seen it all. I've seen absolute bear of a parent just pounding on their kid for 10 years. They come out of the other end, super resilient, super tough and really an exceptional player.
And I've seen those same people, you know, the same kids fold at 14 and 15 and say, this is a miserable experience. I don't want to listen to it in the car. I've had enough of it, right?
And so there's not a specific right or wrong, quite frankly, in how you end up at the other end of the funnel. You know, I think that the word burnout is sometimes or at least the definition of it is miscontrude. I look at burnout when you're a really good player in any sport at seven, eight, nine, ten years old and you're scoring lots of goals and you're making lots of plays and people are calling you to play on teams.
That's really fun. Like being successful is fun. And when you had 12, 13, 14 and all of a sudden you don't grow or you're not working at it as much and you are not as successful.
You're going to games and not being as dominant. That is sometimes misunderstood for burnout. Oh, he's burned out because he's done it for five years so much.
I look at it and say they're just not as successful. So they're not having as much fun. And so it's not necessarily burnout.
It's just lack of success. They go, I don't really want to do this as much anymore. I look at, you know, I'm a big two sport guy, you know, playing two sports.
I think doing 10, 11 months of hockey leads to injury and boredom. And I think you can learn a lot from other sports as well. But make no mistake about it.
If you have a goal to be really a strong player at 17, 18 or 19, you got to do nine, 10 months a year, you know, with this. It might not be all in the ice. Maybe it's shooting pucks in the backyard or stick handling 25, 30 minutes a day or doing slide board.
But you to be a master at your craft these days and keep up with the Jones is you got to pour 75% of your year into that sport. But taking time off playing other sports and then coming back to your main sport two or three months later. Super create super strong, you know, way to attack the next year.
That's for short and avoid kind of physical and mental burnout. But in general, if you want to be super successful at this now, you got to put the time in. And that means more than the traditional kind of months that you and I did, you know, growing up in the 70s or 80s and, you know, putting the skates away for six months just not going to happen.
[Jason Jacobs] (30:42 - 31:50)
The landscape change so much here in Massachusetts from when you and I were we're growing up. I mean, when we were growing up and I think we're around the same age. I mean, everyone just played for their town.
And I mean, there were a few club teams, but like, barely anyone even knew about them. And maybe there was like one kid from your team that might have done something else like as a bad or middle sex something. I don't even remember all the names, but, but now it's kind of flipped right where where town is really struggling and and anyone who's playing competitively plays for club.
Meaning you get kids from all over. And every year, there's some turnover, like whether it's voluntary or involuntary. And so the teams are more transient.
It's more privatized and for profit. What are the biggest differences as you see them between the landscape today versus when we were growing up and and what are the elements of that that you think are good things and maybe what are the elements of that that that you lament or wish weren't how they are.
[Peter Masters] (31:50 - 36:23)
I'm going to push back a little bit on on kind of the concept that these club teams were a major part of kind of the development model for at least Chris and I right in the 80s. We played literally for four teams at the same time. You played town.
You played select hockey, which was the Middlesex Braves. There was kind of a second level. Yeah, Middlesex Braves.
It was a second level kind of club program. The called the Apaches. It was, you know, Chris played on.
And then there was what is now the EHF, but at that time was called the Metro. We had the South Shore Kings and the Minuteman Flames and the Middlesex Islanders. And so you were playing seven, eight games a weekend in 1986 and 87.
So there was still a ton of hockey. I will tell you, I think the difference now is that that was really just for kind of 10% of us crazies. You know, we're playing that 90% were not.
It was town. Maybe you played a little select, but you weren't playing high level club. Now everyone's playing town slash club, right?
Everybody is. And, you know, that started, you know, call it 20 years ago when the privatization of these ranks started to take hold. And I'll slide it back to kind of the tournament business and how that's really changed.
When we grew up, we put the skates away on April 1st. You went to a hockey camp in August to kind of get your edges back. And then you jumped into the kind of normal after Labor Day, you go.
And there's a big tournament called the Sea Spray Tournament down in Pembroke, Habamak area. And that was like the first tournament of the season. When I started coaching back in 2000, 2001, there were a couple of summer tournaments that had started.
The Chowder Cup had one at that time. The event was like 20 teams for, you know, let's call it kids 16 to 18 years old. And that was a big event.
And one year it went to 32 teams. And that was like out of control how, you know, how big it had gotten. And for guys like Chris and I who were trying to find ways to supplement our income in the spring, we said, look, these tournaments exist.
We can charge 200 bucks for the weekend. We can make $1,000 for a weekend and you'll make three or four weekends and I'll pay for your whole summer, right at that time when you're 24, 25. And so this kind of young group of coaches started to see, you know, these 20 teams are doing it.
Now I'll do it. Now you have teams from New York coming or Connecticut and they started to grow. Now if our tournaments are kind of less than 120, 130 teams on a weekend, you're saying, wow, this was a disappointment.
Like this wasn't a type of event you really wanted to run. Are two women's events in the summer collectively like 360 teams over two weekends. And so it's exploded.
And, you know, I believe that when it when the privatized, these ranks needed to sell ice right in April, May, June, July, and so they're all offering it. They all are trying to put either camp programs in or tournaments in there. And that was that was kind of the impetus of how all this really started.
They wanted to sell ice and guys like us wanted to make a few bucks on the weekend. And then on the club side, I remember, you know, kind of a local, you know, I think it was, I think quite frankly was out of the Walpole rank. They had like 120 kids try out for their elite team and they were cutting 100 of them.
And the director said, why am I cutting 100 of these? Let me just create a second and third level. Keep them in house and I'll do better than the town.
I'll give them more practices. I'll give them better coaches. I'll give them better schedule.
I'll give them more tournaments. We'll give them better jackets like we'll do stuff on the website. We'll kind of enhance the experience for the second and third level player.
And the problem that he had was, who is he going to play? Right? So he picked up the phone, called some of his league partners and said, hey, why are we cutting all these kids and sending them back to town?
Let's all create a second and third level so we can have a schedule. And they all looked at each other and said, of course, what are we crazy? Like, why, why, why we've been doing this for the last 10 or 12 years.
And so now every rank has a club program and, you know, you've got a million people calling themselves AAA that aren't. And, you know, quite frankly, most of the parents don't care. The kids love playing.
They want a couple more practices a week. They want more games. And it's organized and they pay a premium for it, but it's only grown.
It's really what the customers want.
[Jason Jacobs] (36:24 - 36:35)
And reflecting on the state of hockey today here in New England, what are the elements of it that you feel good about and what are the elements of it that you maybe wish were different?
[Peter Masters] (36:35 - 38:39)
Well, listen, the level of players way better than we were. That's for sure. I got a video.
Some, one of them, Billy Kelleher, who played up at Dartmouth, who would play with me growing up around us. Dad had kind of one of those big VHS, like video cameras in 1990. And we played on an all-star team versus the Russian 17 team that came over in 91 or 92.
And I saw the video about, you know, six months ago, somehow it got to me. And the whole team was loaded with future kind of BUBC, you know, Providence kids on. It was all high level players.
And our level of play was very average. Quite frankly, we were slow. We weren't that great a skater is compared to today.
My junior team in 1993 won the national championship. So we went back for a, what is it, you know, a 30 year reunion back to Dubuque two years ago. And that Dubuque team was playing the U.S. national team. And the skill level of those players was incredible. They would have beat us by eight goals 30 years earlier. And our team had multiple kids play the national hockey league.
And everyone basically was a division one player. So the level plays much better. It's just faster, more skilled.
Look, the downside on it, I don't really think there's a ton to it. These kids are exercising more. They're making friendships.
They're challenging themselves. They're having some success. They're having failures.
It's all stuff that kind of builds you as a person. So when hockey ends for 99.99% of all of us at 23 24, you know, they've got a nice kind of athletic, you know, team face focus going into kind of the rest of their life. So, you know, other than the cost, right, what it's cost now to rent a sheet of ice or buy a hockey stick or a helmet or kind of all the travel that you're doing and what gas costs.
I think the state of hockey is in a really good place, quite frankly.
[Jason Jacobs] (38:39 - 39:36)
When it comes to development, it seems like, especially as you get to higher levels, a lot of the development that players are going through is happening outside of the realm of their core team, right? They'll play on the team, but then they do a lot of extra stuff, whether it's ed work, whether it's the gym, whether it's shooting, you know, whether it's video, whatever. There's a lot of options out there, a la carte, if you will, and it puts a big toll on family's wallets and also on family's time.
It's quite inefficient. How much of the development do you think should be driven individually by a player and family versus by the team? Or, you know, how much should happen within the walls of your core team and how much should happen outside of the walls of your core team optimally?
And what do you see about what's how it exists today?
[Peter Masters] (39:36 - 41:04)
Well, look, there's only so much time a core team, you know, can get a rank and you can get those 20 kids together, right? And that's usually twice a week for a couple of practices plus on the weekend. And so parents who want to give their kids, you know, a greater opportunity to improve and be successful, I think is a good thing.
I think the money they choose to spend, the time they choose to spend in the car or bringing them there, again, is all individual, no one's forcing them to do it. This is what they've decided to do as a family and kind of makes everyone happy and pushes the ball along. So, you know, it's a tough kind of odd question, you know, for anything below kind of 14 or 15 years old because these kids can't drive, right?
It involves a parent. You know, when you're talking about 15, 16, 17, if you want to keep up with the Midwest, Canada, in Europe, you better be on the ice five or six times a week. You better be doing the office training, you better be doing training on your own, whether shooting in the basement or doing, you know, extra, you know, edge lessons, if you want to, if you want to stay at that level.
And so because it is all, you know, individually individual choice, all of that. Great. You want to do it super, you know, pour your time into it.
It's exercise. It's holding people accountable. It's mastering a craft like these are all positive things for kids to learn and achieve.
So, you know, I'm all for it.
[Jason Jacobs] (41:04 - 41:43)
Last hockey specific question, then we can jump over. I know I want to save time so we can talk about Masters Academy, of course. Another narrative that's out there is that as individual skill has gotten so much better, IQ is really suffered and, you know, teams aren't as cohesive.
You know, players can't think the game like they used to. There's, it's a collection of individuals versus a team. Do you agree or disagree with that?
And, and, and, and if, if you, to the extent that you agree, why do you think that is 100% agree?
[Peter Masters] (41:44 - 43:50)
I would also add to that that the level of toughness of the players, not only kind of mentally but physically has gone down as well. Skill way up, speed way up, skating way up, all the stuff that you want to call, I would say kind of manufacture, you know, through just time in the ice and, and, and coaching. You know, why?
Well, look, they're so structured at six, seven, eight, nine years old, right? And kind of their play, there's very little pond hockey, if any at all. The way that parents quite frankly, demand, you know, their kids be on winning teams, right?
As push parent coaches to kind of play win more, it's push leagues, you know, to create schedules to just give them more games that seem to count more. You know, kind of to people's, you know, happiness where instead of you just throwing the puck out there and having fun and, you know, just being creative and playing for, you know, six, seven, eight years old has all gone by the wayside. And that's extremely disappointing.
And I think it's coming out the other end of the funnel at 17, 18, kind of exactly what you're talking about that they just don't think it as well. You know, anymore, how do you reverse that virtually impossible, right? The customer wants what the customer wants, and they want more games and less practices.
They want to cheer their, your boy or girl on more. They, you know, have more fun watching games than, you know, doing more practices. And so I don't think you're going to reverse that trend.
I think on the toughness end of it, you know, you know, parents, coaches, leagues, rules, referees are just, you know, are just softer, quite frankly, you know, and kind of how the game is played and what's a penalty and not a penalty and, you know, I know, you know, player safety is important, but, you know, it's just the way they've, you know, kind of developed from six to 15, 16 years old. It's just a, you know, less physical, kind of less brutal game. So, you know, the trade off is more skill and speed, but there's just less kids who think it as well.
And the lack of toughness is even greater than that, quite frankly. Okay.
[Jason Jacobs] (43:50 - 44:01)
Now this is my last hockey question because it, because what you just said, maybe you have to stick one more question in, which is toughness and grit, can it be taught and IQ thinking the game can it be taught.
[Peter Masters] (44:02 - 45:56)
Listen, I think the IQ part's a hard one, right? You know, you can talk about, Hey, you got to play with your head up more. You have to look for second, third options instead of just seeing the first one to shoot your better option might be pass or a rollback.
You know, so it can be taught. It can be taught in practice, you know, with certain drills that get you to think about second and third options instead of kind of writes in front of you. But it's not easy, right?
There's a lot of kids that, you know, I was terrible at, you know, languages, right, Spanish, you could put me in front of a Spanish teacher all day, all night, it just wasn't going to sink in. You know, I could learn history, but not Spanish. And so I think some of these kids, you can, you know, try to teach it as much as you want.
They're just not going to get it. I also think teaching it is, Hey, I'm going to run you through a drill and tell you you have to, you know, think in a certain way, but that's gone that afternoon, right? Just gone.
That takes years of continuing allowing these kids to kind of play more kind of free flowing game and it's just not going to happen. So I think that that's hard. You know, toughness, you know, look, that's a little bit of nature versus nurture, but there's no question about it.
You know, we have softened the game considerably over the last 25 years. Someone say for the better because, you know, possibly less injuries. But in general, I think you can push kids through, you know, hey, you got to play through, you know, kind of some hard situations.
You can push them to go to the net harder. You can push them to in practice to do more combat drills, you know, battling for loose bucks and fighting to win, you know, those battles. I don't necessarily think coaches are doing a ton of that these days.
So you can teach it, but there's a bit of, you know, nature to it. Kids just have to be tougher. Kids just have to think it better and it's harder to teach.
[Jason Jacobs] (45:56 - 46:15)
How much of this do you think is attributed to the, to the lack of Shini that's being played? And even if we wanted to facilitate that, like, you know, how do you bring it back given the scarcity of ice time and the cost and everyone's over scheduled schedules and the lack of freezing winters?
[Peter Masters] (46:15 - 47:50)
I think sometimes it gets that Shini Hockier on the lake, it's overplayed, right? In the 80s, it was colder. We had a rink in the backyard.
You got way more days. I built the rink 15 years ago for my kids. I think I got 11 days if I was lucky.
And definitely, you know, 30, 40 years ago, you were getting more time. But we really didn't do a ton of that. I think that's a little bit of a romanticized view of kind of like, you know, we were all out there for 50 days of winter, you know, on the ice for five or six hours.
Like, that didn't happen, you know, quite frankly. I was playing on four organized teams since I was, you know, eight, nine years old. I think how the outcomes of those games didn't matter as much.
It was just go out there and play, have fun. We're going to push you to try to make right plays. But listen, I didn't get great coaching until I was in high school, right?
We just had parents who were out there kind of like standing on the bench, go and, you know, change it up. Now the coaching is held to such a higher level. If these coaches that are on the ice at some of these, you know, these Minuteman flames or Sushor Kings or Islanders, Bay State, wherever, these guys are really putting a lot of time into this and they're kind of better than what we had.
So, you know, look, I think I would hope that from five to 10 years old, the focus on winning. Would disappear. And I think that would matter.
But the days of, you know, playing more shitty hockey, I just don't think they even existed as much as people think that they existed back in the day. I just don't think it was there.
[Jason Jacobs] (47:50 - 48:26)
So switching gears, Peter, to the last eight years of your life. So you guys were, you know, hockey guys, you were players and then you, you know, took took over and then scaled this fantastic organization. That's like a, you know, the gold standard in the, in the, in the youth hockey world in terms of developing exceptional players.
Now you're building an academy that not only incorporates an educational piece and has a big physical component. But it's not just hockey. It's all these other sports as well.
Like, that's not an obvious move for you guys. So where did that come from and why?
[Peter Masters] (48:26 - 52:57)
Well, the exact origin or idea probably came 25 years ago, I was recruiting away in 98, 99, 2000. And at the time we were recruiting only seniors in high school to play junior hockey, right, for 19 and 20 years old. There were no high school kids really playing juniors, at least for us that I could, I could land.
And I kept losing to win Chinden as for PG's. And there was a guy named Mike Odessa who won a championship at RPI as a coach and was an NHL scout a long time kind of hockey staple. I just kept losing to him on the junior side and win Chinden Dan Driscoll was a coach at the time on, on the prep side.
And I couldn't win any of the high school battles. I just couldn't be to prep school for a player and I was telling my father, he said, well, let's just build a prep school. Let's just do that.
And I go, yeah, that's funny. Okay, fine. We'll do that, Dad.
Thanks. And so that was kind of the original thought on it. And then eight or nine years ago, you know, Chris and I looked at, you know, kind of the list of the top 15, 16, 17 year olds playing in the mass state festivals.
And 95% of them, even though we've been in business for almost 15 years and super successful, you know, most of our junior teams are somewhere between 10 to 15 Division 1 players coming off of it. We still were losing, you know, a massive amount of kind of, you know, recruiting battles to prep schools. Once they got there, you couldn't get them out.
It didn't really matter the level of coach or schedule or kind of where our placements were parents in New England want to marry their sports with their academics. And you can't blame them. These are some incredible private schools locally.
Great educations, great facilities and their teams have been successful and their kids have gone on to kind of do some really special stuff in college. But there was a significant portion of them that were disappointed in the development, right? Because you high school seasons were still three months.
You had a supplement in the fall. You know, you had real different levels of coaches. You had some good coaches, but then you had some coaches that were math teachers or history teachers.
And they were on their 24th year and they weren't really putting a ton of time into it. And there was a lot of politics to get played. I'm an elite player as a freshman or sophomore and I'm playing, you know, behind a junior or senior who I'm clearly better than, but they're older.
And that's just how high school goes. And, you know, our level of practice isn't great. It's the same seven drills over and over again.
And, you know, half of our games stink and half of them are okay. And whatever we're spending an incredible amount of money on this. And you saw the success of a Shatix St. Mary's or Culver or Northwood who were doing high school. But doing kind of the full seven months, number one of training and play, you looked at junior hockey, which existed in the Midwest and Canada in Europe slash midget slash junior hockey where you get that seven, eight months of training. And so those players who are at 14 that were as good as any of those Canadians or Midwesterners or some of the Europeans they played in tournaments. Four years later, they were far behind.
And so you take kind of all these factors together and you say, look, hey, dad, you might have been right. Let's create a prep school, but we can't create the same thing that already exists. That'll be an utter failure because, you know, we're just doing more of the same.
Let's create a high end prep school campus culture in curriculum. Married to the IMG model of development, which is four hours of sport a day and five hours of academics, which already kind of exists in some small pockets and hockey in these Shatix and in Northwoods and Culvers. Some of the other selects Academy just popped up, you know, down at South Kent.
They were creating a, you know, they had a private school that they were trying to prop up a struggling hockey program with kind of a different model than what their competitors are doing. And they hired, you know, some of the best club hockey guys in North America to kind of run it. And they were up and running and super successful in the first couple of years.
And so it started to creep into New England when the idea kind of came into our mind, but we wanted to do something bigger. We didn't want to do a mom and pop operation, you know, kind of out of our rink, you know, with some online schooling. We wanted to, again, create something that New England had not seen, not only in hockey, but in all the other sports that, you know, keep people were passionate about.
And so that's where it started.
[Jason Jacobs] (52:58 - 53:20)
And I mean, the obvious step and it sounds from listen to Chris's episode yesterday that a bunch of investors were pushing you guys around like, why don't you just start and hockey prove that in a hockey and then land and expand. But yet when you enter the market, you're entering across all these different sports. Tell me about that decision, both in terms of the breadth of the vision, but also in terms of the breadth of the vision at phase one.
[Peter Masters] (53:20 - 55:19)
To create a campus that could match serve with some of the other top prep schools that existed, you were looking at a 60, 70, you know, $100 million investment, right, to get to that level. And you weren't going to do it just through hockey. You were going to need more numbers, bigger enrollment, and you couldn't have 15 hockey teams.
You were going to have to have three hockey teams and two baseball teams and a couple basketball teams. You're going to have to do boys and girls. And so we went to kind of all the other club leaders in those sports and saying, hey, in basketball, in baseball, in soccer, are you running into the same issue where your parents or your elite players were looking for more development, then you can kind of get a traditional kind of like a private school, and they all said a resounding yes.
They said, OK, great. It's not just hockey. It's all these other sports.
Fantastic. So we don't know anything about running a school. We don't know anything about schedules.
We don't know anything about financial models. I don't know anything about construction. I don't know anything about curriculum visas, you know, accreditations, all of that stuff.
And so we know that the demand is there. We know that this is something different than everyone else is doing and parents and students are looking for. It's worked in other parts of the country.
It's worked incredibly down in Florida with IMG as they were cranking at about 1200 students at that time. Let's put a team together who can help fill out the pieces because you're correct. Investors are looking at us and saying, hey, we understand education is a good business.
We understand sports is a good business, marrying them in kind of one of the most successful private school, you know, areas in the world. It makes a lot of sense, you know, but you got to put the rest of your team together because you need nine parts to this to make this quote unquote, investable. And, you know, so we spent almost two years putting our team together before we really dug into property and started to build out, you know, financial models and seeing if this is what, you know, would be actually investable and would have a good ROI.
[Jason Jacobs] (55:19 - 55:36)
What were the biggest surprises from when you went into the process to today? And similarly, because for whatever reason, I like to ask my questions in twos. How has the story or strategy evolved since you first started telling it to today?
[Peter Masters] (55:36 - 56:07)
Well, the core piece hasn't changed a ton. You know, the five hours academics and four hours of sport is the core. Incredible facilities, coaches, academic team has all been kind of the, you know, four legs of the stool.
We started looking for our first campus right next to the New England Sports Center. There's eight acres of land that's undeveloped. And our thought was, you know, let's kind of mooch off of the Sports Center that exists so we don't have to build our own ranks, right?
Just rent and kind of.
[Jason Jacobs] (56:07 - 56:09)
Is that right right behind the parking lot on the back there?
[Peter Masters] (56:09 - 1:01:07)
Yeah, yeah, correct. Yeah, that's owned by the New England Sports Center ownership group. That was eight acres.
And if you push them dirt around, you could get 10 acres. And so we started there. And so we put our team together.
We found a guy by name, Rich Odell, who was the head of school at IMG. If you go down to IMG, he's the only person with a statue on the property. He was ahead from 99 to 2016.
He grew the school from zero to 1100 students took it from losing a couple million a year to making close to $30 million a year. He left in 2017. I called him up kind of out of the blue in 2018 and said, Hey, we have this concept up here.
We've got this land. Would you fly up and, you know, consider working with us? And he did.
And he brought his partner, who was one of the business leaders at IMG for 20 years. I got my 10 me. Up with him.
Well, the two of them actually Ted came first and he brought rich, but the two of them came up looked at it. Like Chris and I saw the potential of our building. You know, this building puts over a million individual hockey, you know, families or players through the building every year.
So it's kind of a marketing machine. They saw the land. They said, Hey, here's what we get paid, you know, a month, you know, to consult.
And I said, Well, look, I've got no money. So would you be willing to do this on the come, right? Would you?
Well, keep the tab rolling. This should only take more than a year. And then we'll start paying you.
And they said, Sure, we'll do it. Well, it was eight years later. And so they had no idea what they were like saying yes to.
But that started us right getting the architects of the most successful sports academy in the world on board. And then they gave us the roadmap. Hey, we need to find this type of architect.
You got to find this type of construction company. So I just called a bunch of architects and interviewed seven of them and did the same with construction management firms and said, okay, this. You know, it was over my head.
I don't know anything about what they're telling me. I need a project manager, right? And so I called Enzo Skolara up who had been recommended as a, you know, excellent kind of secondary school college.
OPM interviewed two others, but he came to the office as well. And I said, Look, they're talking about price of steel and how many, you know, heads of this department are going to work for us. And, you know, how much it's going to cost to move dirt and GMP contracts.
And I don't know any of it. I need someone on my side. I said, here's what we want to build.
And he says, great. That's what I do. And this is what I get paid.
I said, yeah, I have no money. I said, would you do the same? Would you kind of work?
You know, you know, on the come for this and then it'll only be a year. And Enzo says, yes, I'll do it. And so eight years later, he was still with us.
And so that was kind of our, you know, inside team to start. And then we, you know, started to fill out the rest of it. But next door, the original architectural plans back in two night, 2019 came in at $104 million on the 10 acres.
It was 10 million in site work. We only got one field out of it. We had to build five stories high.
It's super expensive, super risky and not enough elbow room to grow. So we'd spend, you know, a year and a half on that and realize it wasn't going to work. Pandemic hit.
And we brought some advisors on that said, look, you need to go find a distressed corporate campus or maybe something that's gone into bankruptcy that makes more sense. And, you know, so we started looking. And the first place we looked was the international golf course, which had just gone into bankruptcy.
They had two golf courses plus a third, which is a nine-hole course. They had a convention center on property. They had a hotel with 104 beds.
And I said, oh, there's our dorm. We use the convention center to do, you know, our kind of school to start. And it's got this nine-hole course that will, you know, once we prove concept, we'll build all the fields and the, and the classes and classrooms and dorms there and we'll sub out the golf course to someone else.
They'll run it, but it'll be a part of our business. And so once we did the numbers on that, we realized that was uninvestable, too expensive to build all that stuff brand new. So extremely disappointing.
And two weeks later, the real estate agent we were working with said, you got to look at this Bose property over in Stowe. I think it's perfect for what you guys are doing. They're downsizing.
They're moving. That was their secondary campus here in Mass. They're moving everyone to their kind of world headquarters in Framingham and within an hour of walking that property, we knew that was the right place for us.
So it was 2021. And we didn't close in the property until 2024. So it took three years and I could spend three hours on the left, right and center turns on that property.
But that's how we got to where we are. That's how our team came together. And we found the property and that was almost seven years in the making.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:01:07 - 1:01:28)
When it comes to these big kind of infrastructure buildouts and these long processes with, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over, you know, a decade plus or when all said and done. Are there ways to de-risk it early before you bring the big capital in? Or is it more like field of dreams if you build that they will come?
[Peter Masters] (1:01:28 - 1:01:35)
So you're talking about after you build this thing out in kind of the first few years of operation. Or you're talking about the development time and the lead up to get there.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:01:35 - 1:02:08)
I guess I'm talking about the last eight years. Like at now that you're close to opening, right? Because you're opening in September for business.
Or for I don't know if you call it business for school, right? Yeah. Like you're, you know, yeah.
Like is it, is that when you'll is like now when you're trying to sign up students the time that you figure out? Like is there a demand or are there things that you did early on that gave you the confidence that that it would be there?
[Peter Masters] (1:02:08 - 1:04:40)
Oh, no, you definitely had it. No one's going to hand you 83 million bucks without kind of running that thing to ground. That's for sure.
I think you started with just our general knowledge of a hockey family and kind of what they're looking for and what they're willing to pay to go to local private schools and get, you know, what I would say less, you know, development than was possible during that seven or eight months I talked to all these other great sports club people and they said there was the same there. You then look at some historical data. You look at kind of the demand down in, you know, IMG or you're looking at some of those other private schools that were doing it like Shaddick or Culver and Northwood.
And then you looked at some startups, right? Mount St. Charles is an incredible story. The folks that were running the selects academy project got hired to move over to Mount St. Charles, you know, Mount St. Charles, you know, older Catholic school in Woonsock at Rhode Island with an older rink and no dorms and, you know, no real locker rooms hired these guys and within six months they put four teams together that all finished in the top 10 in the country in year one, right? So they got 83 hockey players, you know, to turn from the traditional choices to kind of go to them. And there were other, you know, sports academy, hockey academies that had showed up. Spa up in New Hampshire had, you know, two or three quality teams, you know, taking classes in a rink, right?
And doing this type of development. You had Level Academy at Boston Hockey Academy. You had, you know, Cats Academy.
You had Bishop Kearney start and kind of do the same thing as Mount St. Charles, partnered with a kind of an existing Catholic school and they had multiple national championship teams. So there was already eight or 10 in New England that we're doing what we wanted to do at a different scale, but we're successful with it. Then you start the process and, you know, someone like Cognita, who's our partner at Masters Academy, you know, did corporate diligence and they paid a, you know, really high-end firm to kind of vet all of our assumptions and, you know, processes.
And that was a three-month process for them to go through and look at kind of the demand nationally and locally. And so, you know, there were years of kind of diligence going into, you know, will this work? And it was expensive and it was time-consuming and it was all at risk.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:04:41 - 1:05:03)
From reading it, I mean, it seems like Cognita is not just a significant funder, but they're also, it's almost like powered by Cognita. And I guess it'd be great to understand that decision and what the difference is between powered by Cognita versus doing everything in-house and what is powered by Cognita and what is done in-house.
[Peter Masters] (1:05:04 - 1:06:01)
Yeah, sure. So I'll back up a little bit. You know, we found the Bose Property in 2021.
We had it under agreement for a nine-month period as we try to get some permitting in place with the town and kind of run through the normal diligence on the property. When we've gotten to kind of the end of the, you know, the P&S time we still had and kind of had an agreement with the town in place. It had a switch from an industrial zone to kind of a school zone.
And so we had to give the property back. We then spent time working with the town to get that permitting in place. And then once that happened, you know, we needed to go find a, you know, a dance partner in this.
And that process took from 2021 to 2024 when we bought the property without having funding in place. Quite frankly, we did not have a dance partner, but the price on the property was so attractive that if the school didn't work out, we had other ideas for it, you know, from a business perspective. So we had some backup.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:06:01 - 1:06:04)
We could have spent a whole episode on those other ideas. We won't.
[Peter Masters] (1:06:04 - 1:09:02)
But at least over a beer or something. My partners gave me in the building, gave me three months to land our funding. Hey, you've been doing this for 40 years.
You should either get a yes or no really quick. And at that point, I probably run, you know, a hundred different possible investors through the building. We had either through the building or on zooms and kind of making the pitch.
And so every time we, you got to a point where it got close for someone to say, yes, they go, well, what about this? What about this? And it was usually, look, we don't want to do the diligence of the property.
We don't want to risk it until you own it. Right. And so my thing was always, okay, so I have to buy a building for millions of dollars without knowing that you're going to come in.
Yeah, you got to own it first. And then we'll kind of take this serious. So naively, I thought, sure, once you buy the building, the money was just going to flow in like this was going to be easy.
And where they got to walk it and see it, meet the team and see all our coaches. And that wasn't the case. So the first three months came and went and we had some traction, but we hadn't gotten to a real partner.
And at that time too, Jason, you know, to keep on schedule to open up for fall of 26, we needed to start the permitting process, right? We had to start schematic design. So we raised, you know, close to $2 million in pre-development funds, all at risk.
You know, for those investors, right? If we did not get the funding for the school, we don't own a bunch of architecture plans and a bunch of permits that were worth anything. Just throw them out the window because we're going to do a storage unit here.
We're going to turn it into, we're going to knock the building down and do 12 fields or whatever, you know, other idea we had for it. And so that was, you know, that was a lot of pressure. It was a lot of stress.
We got to that three month point, and my partner said, look, we're going to give you another four months. You have until January 1st of this year to kind of get a term sheet in place. Or we're going to do something different with it.
I met Cognita, you know, you know, was introduced to them in October of 2024. We had a nice initial meeting. I thought it went well.
Then I didn't hear from them for a month. I thought it was like 100 other investors that we had, you know, spent some time with and, you know, decided to pass. And then they called in November and said, we want to take another lap and didn't hear from another month.
And then they said, hey, we want to, you know, put a term sheet together. This is December of last year. I think they're actually in their board meetings right now.
They're annual board meetings at that kind of next level happened. A day before the first, they put a term sheet, you know, forward. We actually had two or three others that it all kind of heated up to that time.
And so we had a couple of other dance partners in there as well. But yeah, January 1st of this year, we started the process and negotiating the term sheet with them. Surprise.
Again, I don't know anything about this stuff, but it took almost six weeks to kind of get that.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:09:02 - 1:09:03)
Well, you do now, Peter.
[Peter Masters] (1:09:04 - 1:09:32)
Yeah, yeah, but down. But Cognita is, you know, worldwide leader in education. They run over 100 schools worldwide.
They have, you know, almost 30,000 employees. This is their second school in the U.S. The first one. They've got York Prep in New York.
We're the second one. They're looking to do schools, you know, eight to 10 over the next five or six years in the U.S. But this is their first sports academy. And so from, you know, basically February to July, we, you know, went through.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:09:32 - 1:09:44)
One clarifying question. It seems like Cognita, they mostly acquire existing ones, right, versus partnering on launching new ones. Was this a, was this kind of an outlier case for them?
Or is this something they've done before?
[Peter Masters] (1:09:44 - 1:11:41)
It seems to be right. First of all, they don't do, they haven't done many schools in the U.S. They don't do a ton of boarding schools. They don't do sports academies.
This is, again, by existing schools, you know, their financing is usually a little different than what they did with us. And so there was a lot of reasons why this, you know, for their board was an extreme leap, you know, faith and just kind of different than what they were doing. I think part of it is, you know, it's very hard to buy, you know, schools in the U.S. that are super successful because most of them are not for profits, right? Where in the rest of the world, that's different. Successful school they can buy because they can. And so I think they realize here in the U.S. if you're going to grow something like this to 7,800 students and, you know, have this EBITDA, you know, all this stuff that kind of comes with it, you're going to have to do something new like IMG did, right? So, yeah, for Cognita, this was different. And I think that's why it took, you know, as long as it did to get through the kind of the diligence process. But yeah, they are a perfect partner for us, right?
You have the firepower of kind of their balance sheet and all their experience and all the kind of best practices they have in place, right? From HR to contracts to, you know, student safety, like all of that stuff that, you know, we would be able to kind of figure out because we've got a great, you know, academic team on our side as well. But they just had it ready to go.
So on top of, you know, the kind of the investment, but, you know, we're on calls, you know, we were on a call for an hour and a half before this today, talking with, you know, their top architect, you know, out of the Middle East on finalizing plans for kind of the last minute changes on our property. And they have two or three other cognita folks in there listening in and working with us. So incredible partner for us.
Really, really got lucky to find a school operator like that to be in bed with.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:11:42 - 1:11:47)
Are they also involved in the curriculum and the teacher selection and the teaching?
[Peter Masters] (1:11:47 - 1:13:06)
No, Rich Odell from IMG is our CEO. We've hired our school leadership. So we kind of have our big, big guys in place.
You know, our head of school director of admissions director of middle school and our, you know, academic dean are all in place. They come from, you know, the private school for profit world. Really, really successful school group called the avenues schools.
They had schools in New York and Sao Paulo and Shenzhen and they've run some of the top schools in the world. As well, we have a partnership with the Newman school. Newman is a 80 year old school on Marlboro Street.
My Shaver is ahead of school. They hired me to coach Middlesex 20 plus years ago when he was there. He then went on to run Kimbell Union for 17 years.
And now he's been at Newman for the last five. And so between their curriculum, their teachers, their leadership, Mike, are, you know, school leadership as well. They've worked together to put the curriculum, you know, package together for us.
Cognita, you know, has their curriculum folks that listen in and offer advice and have questions and push and pull and stuff. But no, it is our team here in the U.S. that's really driving that now.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:13:06 - 1:13:59)
When it comes to opening the doors, I think I heard Chris say yesterday that the goal was to have 250 students in the door for year one. I don't know if that's the right number. Oh, 275, sorry.
So that was just off the top of my head. I didn't write that anywhere. But yeah, I'm surprised I even got that close.
You know, almost 50 after all. But I'm curious how you're thinking about balancing the pressure of filling it with starting off with a strong foundation of quality because quality attracts quality. And also how you think about need-based aid or scholarships in the early years versus ongoing.
And don't give any detail that you don't feel comfortable giving. But those are just some areas that I'm curious to learn more about.
[Peter Masters] (1:13:59 - 1:18:33)
Sure. So look, it starts off with we want to be kind of best in class in everything we're doing, right? So let's start with the property, right?
The property is 82 acres. It was a 360,000 square foot building. We're investing close to $70 million into construction in it.
You'll have three. So you have 12 acres of turf field lighted. You'll have, so that's three soccer fields, cross fields, two baseball fields.
We have a Butler building, 12,000 square feet, high ceilings that we'll do kind of think indoor like Box lacrosse in where you can do baseball soccer and lacrosse training, as well as three base for our golf program for Track Man. We'll have a 40,000 square foot brand new four quart basketball pavilion. So we've got some incredible athletic facilities right from day one.
We're building 197 dorm beds for the dorms. The dorms are in the middle of getting framed right now. But we have some mock dorms built.
They're almost 300 square feet. We've now just rich Chris and I, my son, and our admissions director unloaded the truck from Dallas two days ago, hauled all the oak furniture in there, put the beds up. And now we have some mock dorms for families to see, but they're 100 square feet bigger than kind of college dorms or the average college dorms or prep dorms.
We have a cafeteria for 350. That'll be gorgeous. Brand new classrooms for up to 700 students daily, new admissions, nursing suites, administration study rooms.
We have over 15,000 square feet of performance center weight room inside the billing. So we're going to have a replacement cost for our campus is, you know, 225 to 230 million dollars brand new for extra. So campus is all world.
Our coaches that we've been announcing kind of dripping out over the last month and half are all best in class. You know, look, our fencing coaches, the, you know, US Olympic fencing coach who won gold in 2024. He was named the Olympic coach of the games for fencing happens to live in Littleton.
So he's right around the corner. But we've got some credit basketball, soccer, lacrosse people, you know, every one of our sports. We joke, we call it a bunch of Avengers, you know, when we finally announced everyone on January 15, we get it all out there.
We're going to take a big picture and everyone's going to look at it and say, yeah, that those are some of the top people, not not only in the area, but in the US are ahead of school. Look, Andy ran. Avenue School in Sao Paulo, which, you know, opened up to 700 students in year one.
You know, it's more rated the number one school in South America. It's like a top 20 school in the world. And so he's got an incredible resume and the people he brought with us in the school side again are just best in class.
And so for us to land those numbers for next fall while we're building a school and building curriculum and marketing materials and websites and, you know, all the other stuff that goes with it. You really had to have just kind of like a just an amazing team. And so we do have that.
We have broken down our enrollment into kind of very specific silos. You know, our hockey team has been charged with our hockey directors. And the boys side are charged with building three teams, right?
I think they've settled on you 1415 and a, and a you 18 team. So that's, you know, let's call it 54 54 students on the girls side, you know, they're charged with a couple teams. That's another 36.
And so when you go through basketball across, you know, baseball field fencing, e-gaming golf, everyone's been assigned what we think is a achievable number to hit. And they're out there, you know, working like crazy. I think our soccer coach had eight families on campus, you know, yesterday.
I'm touring five girls hockey families the next two days. We're looking at, you know, almost 50 tours a week right now and our Drew, who's kind of running our admissions right now his schedule to get on phone call with him is three weeks out. So a ton of interest.
And, you know, for us, it's a lot of competition, but you've got, you know, almost 30 kind of full time people working to fill this school for next fall.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:18:33 - 1:19:09)
I've never built a school before, but if for me, I would feel pressure to fill slots, but I would also feel pressure to maintain quality. And I would be, I would rather have it take longer to grow than compromise quality. And start building from a week foundation, but I would be worried about runway to clear the next milestone and getting, you know, kind of airborne before hitting a wall.
Right. And I'm just speaking more of the startup hat on. I've never built a school.
Right. But, but like, I mean, am I, is that, does that, does that resonate? Like, how, like, what, what do you worry about?
[Peter Masters] (1:19:09 - 1:21:54)
Oh, 100%. Look, I'm sleeping four hours a night if I'm lucky. You know what I mean?
I used to, I could snooze till seven, eight o'clock. Now it's, you know, if I sleep till five, that's, that's lucky. And I think a lot of people on our team, the same that, you know, everyone's putting in kind of 12, 14 hour days, you know, right now to kind of deliver on what you're talking about.
Right. And so we don't have misses, you know, in kind of anything, whether it's res life or academics or the building of the school or kind of the recruitment priests and then the delivery of it all. Right.
You're going to have to deliver a great schedule and a great practice schedule and, you know, the right, you know, weight training program and mental fitness and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, look, the reality was we were scheduled to close on all of this in April, May, you know, and as these things happen, there's, you know, it just takes longer than you think to kind of sometimes work through the stuff. So we didn't get to the July.
So I think, you know, we're probably two months behind where we would have liked to have been. And we're just trying to make up that time with just kind of working harder. But we think our enrollment goals and totals are all achievable to do what you just articulated is important, which is to deliver quality on the academic res life and on the field side.
If, you know, Mount St. Charles and their folks could deliver 83 students in six month period, then we surely could do 50 is kind of our attitude. And, you know, that's kind of the same on all the sports, right? You know, our basketball director, John Carroll is the director of the Newman School right now.
He has the number one team in the country. He left Northfield, Mount Herman, where he had one of the top programs in America for 15 years. He started at Newman in June, three years ago.
So just two months before the school would open. He put 17 basketball players in that institution. They don't have a basketball court.
They don't even have a cafeteria. They're on Marlboro Street. And they finished in the top 25 in the country.
Very next year, they were a top 10 in the country. And last year, I think they finished second in the country. They started a women's program last summer, like a month before the school opened, and they picked up 12 or 13 girls, and they finished in, I think, the top five in New England.
And so these people that we've kind of put in place to kind of lead our our sports, again, our best in class, and it gives us a real advantage and cuts the time down that we need to recruit the student athletes that we want. So that's what we're betting on.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:21:54 - 1:23:13)
Yeah. Well, I mean, we could easily keep going, but I'm sure you have a school to build, but I should probably move towards wrapping up. But I have two things to, you know, two reactions as I'm hearing this.
One is, you know, for any of the skeptics that say, like, oh, like, like, let's see if this happens. And it's like, well, there's already a thousand things that you guys have already done that they probably would have the skeptics would have the same thing about. So it's like, look at, you know, look at the facility we got.
Look at the funding that we got. Look at the partner that we got. Look at the architects that we brought to the table.
Look at the, you know, look at the coaches. Look at the, like, look at it. So it's like, all right, now we got to get high caliber students on this timeline.
Like, it's just another thing that no one thinks we're going to do that we're going to do, right? So that's one reaction, right? And the second reaction is something that, yeah, the second reaction is something that Chris said yesterday, which is like, look, like, like, like, bet on yourself and swing big and go hard or go home.
And like, what sorts of happens? It doesn't work. At least we frickin tried, right?
And, and so I just come back to the quote, my favorite quote, which is about the man in the arena, right? And like, you guys are really going for it. And whether it works, I hope it works.
I bet it works, you know, just based on like your, you know, like just your track record of consistently over delivering, right? But, but even if it doesn't, who gives a crap? Like, you guys are really going for it.
I respect that a lot.
[Peter Masters] (1:23:13 - 1:24:14)
Well, thanks. Listen, you know, we looked at we, you know, as, you know, we could do five hours just on the last seven weeks of kind of the diligence periods, the twists and turns and ups and downs is this on is it off, you know, all that kind of stuff. You know, but the thing where, you know, this was in jeopardy a thousand times over the last eight years, right?
There were a thousand times this was not going to work, right? Or you weren't going to land the property. We give it.
And every single one of those times, the most disappointing thing to me was not getting a chance to prove, you know, that the demand and that something brand new like this could be built. And so now we're going to get that chance. And, you know, we'll see if we do it, but I feel really, really good that we've got the team and the property and location and the concept to get there.
And so we're just, we're just going to keep one foot in front of the other and keep grinding to get us to the fall of 26. And I think it's going to be fantastic.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:24:15 - 1:25:08)
Well, I'm rooting for you guys because I mean, I wanted to work. I dig the vision. I dig IMG.
I, you know, I'm going to ask a question that I think for any parents or, or player or players slash students that are at the age of contention where this might fit in the profile of the things they're going to give you a chance to address it explicitly, which is man, like you guys see him at the kind of guys that can pull this off and man, I want this to work and I love this vision and man, it wants to sink gets into orbit and all the kinks are worked out. It's going to be fantastic.
And I don't want to be the fricking guinea pig. Like, like with anything new that you know you don't want to be like in V one of any new thing right because there's a bunch of kinks to be worked out and you don't want to be the sacrificial lamb. So, I'll just give you a chance to address that explicitly since I, I suspect it might be on a lot of people's minds who might be looking at the school.
[Peter Masters] (1:25:08 - 1:26:34)
It's part of the diligence process I went to London to meet with cognita CEO and CFO current for the final final right face to face like hey, you know we're ready to go but we want to be more questions for you. And they said what are the, you know, what are the things that scare the most I gave him a couple things but the real thing was kind of what you're hitting on. I don't have a field to show you I don't have classrooms I don't have teachers running around I don't have food service you don't have the dorms done you are buying into a dream.
And what I would tell parents is, if you're looking for private school education and you are primarily doing it because you want to get a better sport option, then your local public school, you have to come take a look at us. And what does that mean. Take the hour tour, get on the phone call with Drew because all of those concerns about I don't want to be the guinea pig or what is this going to look like 99% of all that stuff goes away once you sit with us meet with us.
Talk with our coaches talk with our academic people feel in touch what's going on over there. Because we are we are just going to give you a completely different development outcome over three or four year period than any of our contemporary it's just it's just it's just impossible for them to give you the amount of time so if you have interest call us spend an hour. And I think that whole guinea pig mentality is just going to go away.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:26:34 - 1:26:43)
So for anyone listening that wants to learn more what is the best way to get in touch with you or or what process should they follow to open up communications.
[Peter Masters] (1:26:44 - 1:27:15)
Yeah, just Google Masters Academy international pop right up. You'll have a little button on there that says inquiry, it'll get you right to our admissions office. You can email me directly if there's a particular sport.
Hey, I'm a figure skater. I'm a soccer player. All the coaches are being updated.
You can click to them directly and call the soccer coach first call the admissions first. You want to find me dial a junior Bruins number get me at the office here and we'll return all your calls and inquiries within 24 hours.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:27:16 - 1:27:29)
Amazing. Well, this has been an unbelievably deep and wide ranging discussion. I greatly appreciate the time especially with so many things you have going on.
Is there anything I didn't ask that you wish I did or any parting words you'd like to leave for listeners.
[Peter Masters] (1:27:30 - 1:27:48)
No, listen, Jason, really excited about this. I think there's a lot of people have a lot of the same questions that you have. And so I hope people take some time to listen to this.
And again, don't be afraid to follow up. We won't bite. And I think you'll really enjoy learning about us.
So thanks for having me on.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:27:48 - 1:27:55)
Well, I love to. I love getting to know you a bit. And I'm really rooting for you guys.
I wanted to work and I'm excited to see how it goes. So thanks.
[Peter Masters] (1:27:55 - 1:27:55)
Thanks.
[Jason Jacobs] (1:27:56 - 1:28:07)
Thanks for listening to Puck Academy. If you enjoyed this episode, follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share it with someone serious about their game. See you next week.