SMA | State of the Academy - 3/20/20

Hello SMA parents and students,

Thank you for joining us for this unorthodox state of the academy address. We hope you and your family are happy, healthy, and safe, and we hope that all of our students are finding ways to get their energy out and keep their love of the martial arts alive. We have terribly missed seeing and working with each and everyone one of you! This has been a tumultuous week and we have come to a difficult decision: As per state recommendations and with our student’s health and safety in the forefront of our mind, the academy doors will remain closed until it is deemed safe to reopen.

Thankfully, we have some exciting news! Starting next week we will be opening our brand new Spectrum Online Academy! We will be streaming classes every weekday to help keep our student’s morale high and their skills sharp! We will have classes as well as coach chats where we will spend time talking with our students. We would like to describe all of our new ideas in detail.

Because many of our parents are currently homeschooling their kids, we would like you to think of these live classes as part of their “PE” curriculum. Even if you no longer train at our academy, we invite you to attend, but current students will get some even better perks!

On Mondays and Wednesdays at 6PM, we will offer a 30 minute live class which will get your child up, exercising, and working on solo BJJ drills which they will be able to implement into their game when they return to the mats. We will also recast (or “premiere”) each of these lessons a second time each week on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12PM, just in case we have kids who missed the lessons the first time OR if kids simply want to do the lessons again!

We want to make sure this is as easily accessible to all of our students so you will only need a few things. Some space to move, your gi (to get you in the right mindset), a pillow, and a ball. We already have 8 lessons mapped out and ready to go for our youth students and we could not be more excited!

Youth students will also be able to continue their belt progression during this time! We will take attendance every class and mark cards like normal. If you are watching the archived version of a class, please comment “completed - and then your child’s name” so we know to mark their card.

Obviously, our standards for stripes will be slightly different since we will not be at the academy and students will not be training live with resisting opponents, but if a student completes 8 live classes during our closure, we will reward them with a stripe when classes resume at the academy!

For our adults, we will be live streaming 30 minute classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6PM. In these classes we will be going over some basic and advanced solo drills that every student should absolutely take the time to drill and learn. We will be drilling guard solo drills, bottom solo drills, top solo drills and more. We will contextualize each of these drills with the actual situation in which they are used. If you have a partner you can even drill it as a partner drill. We will also allot plenty of time to Q&A in these classes so that you can ask the burning questions you undoubtedly have!

On Fridays at 6PM we will offer a 30 minute live kickboxing class! This will be appropriate for both our youth and adult kickboxing students. We will cover solo drills and combos, and show you ways you can drill strikes even without a punching bag! No special gear is required for this class.

Finally, on Mondays and Wednesdays at 3pm we will hold 30 minute live Coach Chats. In these Coach Chats, we will sit down and talk with our students. We know that many of our younger students may not have any interaction with their school teachers this time and we aim to change that. We will use these chats to discuss different topics and themes.

We are also in talks with ALL of our SMA coaching staff to create a live class schedule for each one of them! Creating a comprehensive and expansive online learning experience!

Of course, all of these online classes will be recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel and pieces will be snipped out to add to our growing Spectrum 101 archive (which is an awesome archive to take advantage of at this time! Remember to download our free app SMA Go and use academy code 2015 for easy access on the go!)

But, how can you watch these classes live, when they’re happening, and even interact with the coaches?

We will be live streaming on two different platforms. The first is the one you’re watching us on right now: Facebook Live. This has been our live streaming platform since we opened the academy, however, we understand that not everyone uses Facebook and it does have some limits, the main limit being - we can’t see you!

We are excited to announce that we will also be streaming live on Zoom. Zoom is a completely free website which allows you to dial in to an online class and, if you would like, stream your video and audio using your phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a webcam. This will allow us to actually see our students practicing, talk with them one-on-one, and continue to build a rapport with our students.

In the next few days we will post and email links to all of our upcoming live classes on Zoom and a download link to download the app for free. You can register your free account and see what our schedule will look like! Once you have entered the virtual class room on the day and time of the live class simply enter your child’s name so we can track their attendance and join in! Again, this is totally FREE! If you would like to have your child interact with video and audio make sure you have a device with such capabilities and make sure you allow the app to access them. If you do not have such a device, no worries! Your child can still access the live stream to watch! We soon will be putting out a printed schedule through email with all of the broadcast details.

We are very excited to start our new online academy on Monday and we hope you are too! With all of this news out of the way we do have a few more points to touch on.

Our policy for the last 5 years has been to allow families to freeze their account for free for one month, or for up to 3 months with a $45 deposit which reserves their spot at our academy. We do not use long term contracts so we don't lock our families in to a 6 to 12 month agreement. For cancellations we require a 30 day cancellation form filled out which equates to one final payment to be made. We offer this flexibility because we understand the curve balls life can throw at us.  

As of today, all accounts are on hold unless we were specifically requested to resume payments by individuals who wish to support the academy during this time. To those of you who have requested payments to continue, we humbly thank you. However, once we roll out the online academy next week, we will be unfreezing all accounts that were not previously frozen for unrelated reasons and resume payments on the same schedule you had previously.

We only felt comfortable making this decision with the knowledge that we were doing our best to still offer the same value we normally do to you and your family.

As many of you may know, we have been spending the last year saving money to help us buy land to build our own building to house our academy and the community we have built. We want you to know that with the money we have saved we will be able to keep our academy open, hopefully, for the extent of this necessary closure. However, this means that our plans for moving into a bigger, better space may need to be pushed back.

We both have backgrounds as elementary school teachers and as such, have always felt comfortable taking the same amount of wages as someone of that profession. However, to help keep our academy afloat, we are ready to take a smaller amount of money as our income to help keep our dreams alive. And we also understand if you need to make cuts as well.

Please know that we will do everything in our power to keep our academy functioning, our students happy, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu a part of our community.

We sincerely ask our families this - if you can stick with us for at least 2 more months - that’s going to help us still be in business when all of this is over. We promise that we are going to keep bringing you exceptional value! We are just asking for your support! We are a small business and without the support of our families - our small business might not be here when this is over.

We understand that life and finances can be difficult and this pandemic has hit families in ways many of us can not even imagine. Because of this we are happy to extend any student’s frozen status for as long as our academy is physically closed. If you feel you need this service extended to you, please email or contact us at our email address, spectrumbrothers@gmail.com, our phone number 304-268-3241, or as a message on any of our social media.

We are clearly in an unprecedented time. However, leaders don’t panic. They prepare. We have built a community at our academy that we know will not only overcome this obstacle, but we will thrive.

Thank you for listening. And we’ll see you on the mat.

Ray and Seth Miller