Athlete Institute: Parent Interview with Josh Jean-Baptiste

Watch our Parent interview with Josh Jean-Baptiste to hear firsthand what children experience and how they grow at Athlete Institute.

Transcript of the interview

What’s unique about the program at Athlete Institute Camps that made you want to enroll your child there?

I think first off is the coaching. All the coaches and camp counselors are actual coaches at Athlete Institute, so they all coach the high school boys' teams that are there. Boys' teams that have achieved pretty much the highest honours you can in high school basketball. Some players have gone on to play Division I college and in the NBA. So it's these same coaches that are then coaching all the boys who are there for the summer camps.

I think that was number one for us, the quality of the coaches and the instruction. Marcus actually plays for Bounce Elite, which is a rep basketball program that's affiliated with Athlete Institute. So we've been around some of the coaches, and then it was just kind of like a natural progression, right? Once he wanted to do his first overnight camp, he probably felt most comfortable with the counselors and the coaching because we are familiar with the program in a way.

It was quite easy to find the program and get a lot of information. We follow a lot of the coaches on social media and online. He'd also done a week of the camp prior to this past year, so right before the pandemic, I believe.

What would you highlight about Athlete Institute's camp counselors or facilities, and what can you tell us about that?

The facilities are stellar, right? I mean, it's one of its kind, at least in the GTA, perhaps Ontario, even Canada, right? To have a full-sized high school basketball court, entire facility. They have dorms, they have everything right on site, so the boys can kind of easily get familiar with their surroundings and all that kind of stuff.

Like I mentioned before, the quality of the instruction and the coaches at Athlete Institute is probably the tops in the country. Again, the level of players that have gone through the system, I mean, Jamal Murray has played there, Ignas Brazdeikis, and there's a whole bunch of other Division I basketball players who went through this program. So again, from a parent's perspective, if you're looking for a basketball camp, this is probably the best camp in Canada you can send your kids to.

How and when did you know that Athlete Institute was the right fit for your child?

We knew that it was the right place after, I think it was in 2019, his first week of camp. We went to pick him up after his first week and he didn't want to come home. He wanted to stay for another week or two. So we knew right there that it was probably the best camp.

Most camps he goes to, he enjoys, but then he's ready to come home. This was the first one where he was like, "No, I want to stay another week, two weeks, a month. I want to do a whole next summer," right? So we knew right there that it was definitely one of the better camps out there.

Was there any change or noticeable personal growth you saw in your child after time at Athlete Institute?

From a basketball perspective, we definitely noticed after every week of camp, he would definitely level up. The coaches there, they know what they're doing, the instruction's right. They know how to kind of pick apart different things of your child's game, and it can definitely elevate the different aspects.

I think it was a really comfortable environment for him, and he didn't get homesick. He hasn't done that many overnight camps away from us, but he's with a lot of other like-minded boys, and they all kind of have the same goals and things they want to achieve in life. He'd always want to stay. We'd have a tough time even getting a hold of him on his cell phone, mainly just because he was having fun with his friends.

He was able to be a bit more independent and kind of think on his own and meet new friends. I do think all around he just became a much more well-rounded person in the weeks right after camp. The first time he went, it was one week, and like I said, he wanted to stay. This time around, two weeks. He could have probably stayed the whole entire month of August. He loved it.

How can parents overcome hesitancy to send their children away for a week or longer?

It's always tough as a parent to send your kid away for at least even the first week. Most parents probably have more anxiety than the kids do when it comes to sending them away. But in this case, we knew some of the coaches from being in the rep side of the program, and we knew that they always did a really good job with boys. They were never those coaches that screamed or yelled or anything like that. They were always about development and developing the boys.

We felt very comfortable that there wouldn't be any of that, no negativity. They always had positive reinforcement. The boys are also allowed to have certain times throughout the day where they're allowed to have access to their cell phones, so they can still text, so we can still have access. Even though sometimes our son would ignore some of our texts and phone calls just because he was having fun with friends.

Just knowing those things really helped in terms of bringing our anxiety levels down.

What would you tell other parents about the overall value of sending kids to Athlete Institute camps?

In our case, the overall value of Athlete Institute is that you're getting prep-level, almost NCAA-level coaching for your kids. So if your kid has goals set where they want to play first prep basketball and then maybe potentially college or university basketball, this is the program that you probably want to have them in. It's worth every penny in terms of preparing them for those next steps.

Our son more than likely will want to be playing prep basketball in high school, so he's going to be away from home for six to seven months out of the year and learning how to balance both schoolwork and basketball. This is a program that really sets them up well for those next steps, and you can kind of see if your kid is able to handle that, right?

It's kind of like a low-stakes way of experiencing that type of lifestyle. Kind of forces them at a younger age to start figuring it out, right? He's 13, he's in grade 8, next year's high school. We're not too sure about whether we're going to be sending him to prep school next year, but this is kind of a good prep for prep school and then even prep for college and university, which is only five or six years away, right? They start to kind of learn in small doses how to be able to operate independently on their own away from family. So it's kind of a good stepping stone to that.

What does your child say about the camp, either to you or that you may have heard them say to friends or others?

The first time he went to Athlete Institute's camp was only a week, and that's all we heard about for probably two months was camp. Everything he talked about, whether in reference to his own development as a basketball player, always went back to his coaching at camp.

This year he did two weeks. So in between the two weeks, he came home on the weekend. All the feedback was that for the first time he felt tired after a day. These kids have so much energy, right? They'll go to basketball practice and they'll still be able to play an entire day worth of games, or it seems like they have endless amounts of energy. But for the first time at camp, he was like, "You know what, after some days of training, I actually felt tired."

They push them, right? They don't push them to the point where they're collapsed or anything like that, but they know that these are kids, they have a lot of energy, and so they push them to the point where they actually start feeling a little bit of tiredness that they may have not felt before.

Any final thoughts about your experience with Athlete Institute camps?

If your child has any aspirations to play high-level basketball, whether at the rep level or prep school or later down the road in college, Athlete Institute is the program that you want them in because it sets them up for success down the road.

Not only do the coaches have all the expertise to kind of bring the best out of your kids, they also are the most connected people probably in this country when it comes to knowing coaches of different prep programs, different universities, different colleges. They can make the phone calls, they can make those introductions to get your kids in front of these other coaches.

If they do have aspirations to play at higher levels, these are the people that you want to know, and these are the people that you want advocating for your kids to get into some of those more prestigious programs down the road.

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