Latest news with #SPIRE
Cision Canada
14-05-2025
- Business
- Cision Canada
SPIRE Academy Taps NBA, NFL, and UFC Alumni to Lead Its Next Chapter of Commercialization and Player Partnerships
New Hires Bring Emmy-Winning Talent, Major League Experience, and NIL Fluency to Drive SPIRE's Brand Forward GENEVA, Ohio and HARPERSFIELD TOWNSHIP, Ohio, May 14, 2025 /CNW/ - SPIRE Academy, a premier multisport boarding school and athletic training institution, has added three nationally recognized leaders to its executive team. These hires reflect SPIRE's focused strategy to strengthen brand partnerships, expand media operations, and deliver athlete development programs aligned with today's NIL-driven sports landscape. Adam Taylor – Head of Content and Media Taylor joins SPIRE from the PGA TOUR, where he served as Senior Director of Original Content and Production. An Emmy-winning and multiple Emmy-nominated producer, and a member of the Directors Guild of America, Taylor brings a wealth of experience from leadership roles at the NFL, UFC, and Disney. His work spans global media platform development, end-to-end content production across platforms, and audience engagement at scale. "This is about more than producing content," said Taylor. "It's about building a brand that can stand alongside the biggest names in youth sports. We have the people, the platform, and the permission to tell stories that matter." Taylor will oversee SPIRE's storytelling, content strategy, production, and media partnerships. "Adam's leadership and media vision give us a powerful advantage," said Steve Sanders, CEO of SPIRE Academy. "He brings the experience and instincts to position SPIRE not just as a school, but as a cultural brand in youth sports." Amy Liles – Head of Partnerships and Tournaments Liles, most recently with the Hall of Fame Village, brings more than 20 years of experience structuring partnerships for leading sports and real estate development brands, including the Cleveland Cavaliers, Andretti Autosport, and Redwood Living. She has negotiated over $100 million in sponsorships with companies such as Coca-Cola, Marriott, Budweiser, Porsche, and The Cleveland Clinic. "We are building long-term value by creating partnerships that serve student-athletes and brands equally," said Liles. "SPIRE offers the kind of authentic, high-engagement environment sponsors are looking for." "Amy understands how to merge brand strategy with immersive experiences and real ROI," said Sanders. "Her approach will help us scale SPIRE's tournament footprint and deepen our commercial relationships." Matt Cohen – Assistant Athletic Director and General Manager Cohen comes to SPIRE from Montverde Academy's Center for Basketball Development, where he worked alongside Hall of Fame coach Kevin Boyle, who was named SPIRE's Director of Basketball and National High School Head Coach in March. A former NBA league office staffer, Cohen has hands-on experience across NIL compliance, recruiting strategy, and player development. "Our athletes need more than training," said Cohen. "They need access, structure, and real opportunities. We're building the bridge that connects what happens on the court to what's possible off it." "Matt has the instincts and experience to make NIL actionable at the high school level," added Sanders. "He connects the brand, the content, and the athlete, bringing it all together in a way no one else in our space is doing." Setting a New Standard This is the first time a high school institution has assembled a leadership team of this caliber to drive a unified strategy across partnerships, media, and athlete marketing. Each executive brings proven success from the professional ranks, now applied to an elite youth development model. "These leaders represent a major step forward in how SPIRE operates," said Sanders. "Adam, Amy, and Matt bring not only talent to our team, but also increase our credibility, reach, and scale as we build an academy business aligned with the future of sports." To learn more about SPIRE Academy and its programs, visit About SPIRE Academy: SPIRE Academy is a comprehensive academic, athletic, personal skills and college-and-career development boarding school located in a world-class event and wellness complex in Ohio's Harpersfield Township. Constructed on 750 acres under 850,000 square feet of roof, SPIRE Academy ( has five divisions: (1) SPIRE Academy & Camps, an accredited college-preparatory international boarding school and multi-sport/specialty training and development academy for grades 9-12 and post-grads; (2) SPIRE Leagues, Clubs & Professional Teams, including SPIRE Academy affiliated leagues and club programs; (3) SPIRE Events, a facility and associated team that host local, national and international tournaments and events with the NCAA, the Big East, Big Ten, Atlantic 10 conferences, the Olympics and world championship qualifiers; (4) SPIRE Institute, the research and development arm of SPIRE Academy, studying performance improvement across multiple disciplines through corporate affiliations and university relationships; and finally (5) SPIRE Fit, a membership-based fitness, swim, personal training and health center open to the community. Sports currently featured at SPIRE Academy include men's and women's basketball, esports, lacrosse, soccer, swimming, track and field, volleyball and wrestling.
Forbes
20-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Today's ‘Wordle' #1401 Hints, Clues And Answer For Sunday, April 20th
How to solve today's Wordle. Looking for Saturday's Wordle hints, clues and answer? You can find them here: Happy Easter, dearest Wordlers! I hope you have a nice Sunday, whether or not you celebrate this particular holiday, and some good feasting and perhaps even something in the way of chocolate eggs. However you spend your Sunday, there's one thing we all have in common: We have to solve this Wordle! The Hint: Useful for fixing pants or jackets, or video games. The Clue: This Wordle has mostly consonants. Okay, spoilers below! FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder . . . Today's Wordle Every day I check Wordle Bot to help analyze my guessing game. You can check your Wordles with Wordle Bot right here. CLOUT was a very good opening guess today. Very lucky. I was left with just two yellow boxes, which didn't seem great, but later I'd learn I only had 26 remaining solutions. Not too shabby! I went with all new letters for my second guess and SPIRE cut that number down to just one: PATCH for the win! Huzzah! Today's Wordle I get 1 point for guessing in three and another for beating the Bot. The Bot gets 0 for guessing in four and -1 for losing to me. This turns the tide of battle for the first time this month, as I leap into the lead for April: Erik: 11 points Wordle Bot: 9 points As you can see, the Bot is still in the lead, but only just barely. And there's still almost two weeks left. This could go either way! I do love a close game . . . . The word patch comes from the late Middle English pacche, of uncertain origin. It may be related to the Anglo-French pieche (piece of cloth) or the Middle English pece (piece). It originally referred to a piece of material used to mend or cover something and later extended to various contexts, including software ("a patch to fix a bug"). Let me know how you fared with your Wordle today on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog where I write about games, TV shows and movies when I'm not writing puzzle guides. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Vast swarms of hidden galaxies may be secretly bathing the universe in a soft glow
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A secret population of hidden galaxies suffusing the universe in a soft glow of far-infrared light have been strongly suggested to exist, based on careful detective work into some of the most unique data to come from Europe's Herschel Space Observatory. The galaxies, if they are real, are not necessarily a surprise. The cosmos is filled with light across all wavelengths — it's just that the far-infrared component seems to be stronger than can be accounted for by all the galaxies we can see in visible light. In other words, there must be something else in the universe producing its glow. Far-infrared light, associated with longer wavelengths than what even the James Webb Space Telescope can see, is emitted by cosmic dust that has absorbed starlight. Cosmic dust is produced by the cycle of star birth and death. Dust condenses around newly formed stars — it's what planets like Earth are built out of, after all — and then is produced in huge quantities when stars die. The more intense the star formation, the more rapid the cycle of star birth and death. And the more rapid the cycle, the more dust is produced. Eventually, enough dust can be produced to literally hide the stars within a galaxy. This has led astronomers to wonder whether there are countless galaxies out there shrouded in dust —- galaxies that are quietly contributing to the far-infrared background of the cosmos. The trouble is, nobody had seen them —until possibly now. "The cosmic infrared background is like a jigsaw puzzle, but there are some pieces missing," Chris Pearson, an astronomer at the U.K.'s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, told "We've always known that we need something to complete the puzzle, but we haven't really known what shape or form those missing pieces were going to be." Pearson led a team who used archival data from the Herschel Space Observatory to search for these missing pieces. Herschel, which was capable of viewing the universe in long wavelengths of far-infrared light, ended its mission all the way back in 2013. However, as a member of Herschel's original instrumentation team, Pearson knew of some observations that hadn't been available to regular astronomers. One of Herschel's primary instruments was SPIRE, the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver. To ensure that SPIRE remained calibrated correctly, it was pointed towards a barren patch of sky just 3.5 degrees from the North Ecliptic Pole once or twice a month. "By looking at the same area of sky we always expected to get roughly the same result, and if we didn't, if we saw a systematic drift over time such as everything getting bright each month, then that would be indicative of some change in the characteristics of SPIRE, and we'd have to create a calibration correction," Pearson said. SPIRE imaged this "dark field" 141 times, but because it was only used by the instrument team to monitor the equipment itself, the dark field images were not released to the general astronomical community. However, Pearson's team realized that the images could be useful for more than just calibrating SPIRE. They stacked the 141 images — astro-imaging parlance for adding and merging the images on top of one another, which dramatically increases the signal-to-noise ratio — and threw in some data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to create the deepest far-infrared view of the cosmos ever made. In this "dark field," they identified 1,848 sources of far-infrared emission. Now, the problem with observations at long wavelengths is resolution: you just don't get sharp images like you do with the Hubble or James Webb space telescopes. Even though Herschel's mirror, was larger than Hubble's, at 3.5-meters (11.5 feet) in diameter, to Herschel, the 1,848 far-infrared sources all look like amorphous blobs. Therefore, a careful statistical analysis had to be undertaken to figure out what these blobs actually are, and whether they match typical galaxy distributions. The conclusion is that they are dusty, star-forming galaxies at a range of distances from us; they are hard to find because they are faint, probably indicating that these are not large galaxies, but rather smaller dwarf galaxies undergoing their first intense bursts of star formation. If one were to extrapolate the findings all across the sky, the result would be an awful lot of small, dusty, star-forming galaxies that collectively contribute a significant fraction of the far-infrared background, and of the overall energy budget of the universe. Still, it's not necessarily the first time that some of these galaxies have been seen; they may have turned up in deep images taken by Hubble or the JWST, for example. "But it's making the link between what you see at one wavelength and what you see at another wavelength that's the problem, and again it's down to resolution," Pearson said. For example, an optical image taken by Hubble might show a cluster of individual galaxies, but in the Herschel image they would appear as just one blob of infrared light. "You don't know how many of those galaxies that you see at optical wavelengths are actually also contributing to the emission of this blob," Pearson said. What's needed is more data to fill the gaps and confirm that this population of hidden galaxies is real. That data will not be forthcoming from Herschel, though: "We've pushed what Herschel could do right to the limit with this," Pearson said. On the bright side, there are two other possibilities. One option is to conduct observations at submillimeter radio wavelengths, which is the next waveband up from far-infrared. Although the North Ecliptic Pole is not viewable from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, Pearson's team does have some observing time coming up on the Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii, which can see the dark field. Beyond that, Pearson is a member of a consortium behind a proposed NASA mission called PRIMA, the Probe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics. PRIMA has made it to the final shortlist for NASA's next billion-dollar Probe class mission, competing against one other mission, the Advanced X-ray Imaging Satellite (AXiS). Final selection takes place in 2026. Related Stories: — Record-breaking 'dead' galaxy discovered by JWST lived fast and died young in the early universe — Is our universe trapped inside a black hole? This James Webb Space Telescope discovery might blow your mind — James Webb Space Telescope sees early galaxies defying 'cosmic rulebook' of star formation If PRIMA does go ahead, its telescope mirror will actually be quite a lot smaller than Herschel's at just 1.8-meters (6 feet). "So in terms of taking pictures, it won't help us because they're still going to be blurry," Pearson said. What PRIMA will specialize in is spectroscopy, breaking down the infrared light into individual wavelengths to learn more about the constituents of these galaxies, how much star formation is taking place and how far away they are. As Pearson said,, "If PRIMA goes ahead, it's going to be absolutely instrumental in solving this." Two papers describing the results, one with Pearson as the lead author and another led by Thomas Varnish of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were published on April 9 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
SPIRE Academy Hires Veteran Volleyball Coach Andy Cole as Program Director and Head Coach
GENEVA, Ohio, April 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- SPIRE Academy—a sports academy located in Geneva, Ohio—announced today that it has hired Andy Cole to be its new Volleyball Director and Head Coach. Cole has been coaching volleyball for 22 years, much of that time at the college level. "This is an exciting time to be coaching volleyball," said Cole. "There are currently three professional women's volleyball leagues in the U.S. This indicates a great deal of momentum in the sport at the national level, and women's volleyball is already big at the local level, here in Ohio. My first priority with SPIRE Volleyball is to grow the program. With this kind of popularity nationwide and locally, and with the Olympic-level facilities that SPIRE Academy offers players, robust and sustainable growth shouldn't be an issue." Cole is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He began playing volleyball at the age of seven, and played from that point on, through high school and then at Ohio State University. At the collegiate level, Cole coached volleyball at: Westcliff University (Head Coach); Cerro Coso Community College (Head Coach); the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (Technical Coordinator, Assistant Coach); Northwood University (Assistant Coach); Loyola University of Chicago (Graduate Assistant Women's Coach); and Lewis University (Assistant Men's and Women's Coach). Cole's first coaching job was at Glen Hills Middle School in Wisconsin. But for all his experience coaching, he had never coached high school. One of the reasons Cole came to SPIRE was the opportunity to coach high school volleyball at an immersive level—immersive because, at a sports boarding school like SPIRE, the job is 24/7. "Coaching at SPIRE, you get tuned in to the life and development of a student athlete at a comprehensive level," said SPIRE CEO Steve Sanders. "You have to want this kind of challenge, which Andy clearly does. He understands our values and our mission, which is a focus on the whole person—a long-term view of the student athlete versus a short-term one. That's The SPIRE Way. Andy gets it. We're excited to have him on the SPIRE team." About SPIRE Academy SPIRE Academy is a comprehensive academic, athletic, personal skills and college-and-career development boarding school located in a world-class event and wellness complex located in Ohio's Harpersfield Township. Constructed on 750 acres under 850,000 square feet of roof, SPIRE Academy ( has five divisions: (1) SPIRE Academy & Camps, an accredited college-preparatory international boarding school and multi-sport/specialty training and development academy for grades 9-12 and post-grads; (2) SPIRE Leagues, Clubs & Professional Teams, including SPIRE Academy affiliated leagues and club programs; (3) SPIRE Events, a facility and associated team that host local, national and international tournaments and events with the NCAA, the Big East, Big Ten, Atlantic 10 conferences, the Olympics and world championship qualifiers; (4) SPIRE Institute, the research and development arm of SPIRE Academy, studying performance improvement across multiple disciplines through corporate affiliations and university relationships; and finally (5) SPIRE Fit, a membership-based fitness, swim, personal training and health center open to the community. Sports currently featured at SPIRE Academy include men's and women's basketball, esports, lacrosse, soccer, swimming, track and field, volleyball and wrestling. Media ContactMonica Kolbaystoriesadmin@ View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE SPIRE Academy Sign in to access your portfolio
Associated Press
11-02-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
EPS Learning's Reading Accelerator Now on Ohio Department of Education Approved List of Evidence-Based Reading Intervention Programs
EPS recognized for its proven impact on improving foundational literacy skills for striving students. BETHESDA, Md., Feb. 11, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- EPS Learning, the leading provider of PreK-12 literacy solutions— is delighted to announce that EPS Reading Accelerator is joining four other EPS Learning solutions (SPIRE, iSPIRE, SPIRE Foundations, and Wordly Wise 3000) on the state of Ohio's Approved List of Evidenced-based Reading Intervention Programs. The Ohio Department of Education's list of approved reading intervention programs includes solutions that meet the required criteria for prekindergarten through grade 12. This recognition underscores Reading Accelerator's effectiveness in helping middle school students master foundational reading skills, aligning with the latest research in the science of reading. Designed specifically for striving readers, Reading Accelerator provides targeted, high-impact intervention for students in Tier 2, whole-class, and small-group settings. The program is ideal for students who need additional support in developing key reading skills, including phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. 'We're thrilled that the Ohio Department of Education has recognized Reading Accelerator as a valuable tool for improving literacy,' said Steven Guttentag, CEO at EPS Learning. 'With its clear structure, proven methods, and ease of use, Reading Accelerator empowers educators to provide targeted, high-quality instruction that drives real progress for students who need it most.' Key Features and Benefits: Ease of Use and Engagement: Reading Accelerator is easy for teachers to use and enjoyable for students, with explicit, systematic instruction in 5-step lessons paired with engaging content. It offers both print and digital independent practice options, keeping students motivated. Quick and Effective Implementation: Educators can get started with just one day of initial training and continue to improve their own skills and confidence through ongoing coaching and support. This makes Reading Accelerator an ideal solution for schools looking to implement evidence-based interventions without adding complexity to their already busy schedules. Included with this hybrid print and digital program is EPS' online platform, providing scripted lessons, digital projections, and resources for teachers new to foundational literacy instruction. Real-Time Feedback: Teachers receive ongoing progress monitoring data and lesson-specific support to provide corrective feedback to students through the included AI reading tutor. Students engage with the online tutor for practice and assessment, including opportunities for oral reading fluency development, coupled with immediate feedback in the form of micro-interventions to support ongoing reading development. EPS Learning currently works with districts across Ohio to improve literacy outcomes including Columbus City School District, Akron Public Schools, and Clyde-Green Springs School District. This recognition from the Ohio Department of Education will enable more districts, schools, and educators in Ohio to partner with EPS Learning to close literacy gaps and create more confident readers. Reading Accelerator is also available in an elementary edition, offering the same evidence-based approach as the middle school edition, with specially created content, oral language activities, and grade-level-aligned vocabulary designed for younger readers. About EPS Learning EPS Learning has partnered with educators for more than 70 years to advance literacy as the springboard for lifelong learning and opportunity. The solutions included in the EPS Literacy Suite are based on the science of reading and support grades PreK through 12, all tiers of instruction, and every pillar of reading. EPS Learning offers evidence-based intervention and customized professional learning to help move students toward growth, mastery, and success. Visit to learn more. Media Contact
