This is our most important mission in sport. It’s WHY we coach, play, train, and compete. Leadership and character development is more important now than ever before in sport. Too much of the influences in youth sport run counter to the very lessons we wish to teach.

Pretty sure Pavel didn’t mean victory is best achieved by assembling “elite” second graders onto an all-star team that costs so much it prices most families out of the competition... #youthsports #hockey #feltboots

Our Fortis Leaders T-Shirts are now available! Train Hard. Lead well. Wear Fortis. Get your shirt here: thefortisacademy.com/product/fortis…

Ultimate leadership requires leaders to be humble, hardworking, inclusive, and determined. The leadership of Edina Ultimate certainly reflected those important traits in our gym training sessions. Train Hard. Lead Well. Live Fortis.

Our quick-hit leadership and character development lessons are an essential part to our Complete Athlete program. Sports leadership is not intuitive - at least for most of us. We have to work at it and think about it. Fortis Leaders

We are excited to announce we have teamed up with Fortis Academy and their Fortis Leaders program to run a mentorship program for middle and high schoolers in the Twin Cities, MN area! The program is already underway, with approximately 30 mentors who play D1, D3, USHL, NAHL, etc…

One of our most impactful seminars is our athlete seminar where we spend an hour identifying team leadership challenges and brainstorming actionable and specific leadership. #leadership #fortisleaders

As parents, we need to actively engage our athletes in helping them understand how to respond to leadership challenges. It is common for athletes to vent about team issues. Our job as parents is to guide them toward solutions and to refrain from unhelpful negativity.

We are incredibly excited to work with the Eagan Youth Hockey Association to implement our leadership and character development program this upcoming season! This is our most important mission as coaches, parents, and administrators in youth sports.

A "state of mind" can be very fleeting. Motivation can easily fade. We need to rely on discipline and a rock solid character to continue on through adversity in sport.

Lead Well. Live Right. #fortisleaders #leadershiptraining

As coaches, we can get overly concerned about tactics and strategy. How often are we checking in individually with our athletes? When we meet with our athletes we improve trust, find areas of confusion that need to be addressed, and spot problems before they fester too longer.

We are excited to work with the Jefferson Youth Association again this upcoming season! Their athletes will be on our year 2 curriculum with new lessons for each level within the program. Go Jags! #fortisleaders #leadership #leadwell

As coaches, parents, and administrators of youth sports programming, we need to be careful to not overemphasize external rewards for performance, in particular at the younger ages. Let's build intrinsic motivation instead!

Edina Boys HS Lacrosse has been a training partner of our sports performance programming and we are excited to add in more leadership and character development training this upcoming year! #leadership #leaders #leadwell

As coaches we want to, as much as possible, create drills and training environments that teach the athletes - rather than us constantly trying to correct errors. Create a drill that teaches implicitly and retention and game-transfer will increase substantially.

To develop resilient athletes we need to let them fail. And we need to let it not always be fair that our athletes haven't measured up. Battling through adversity that doesn't seem fair or right helps build resilient athletes.

Excited to partner with Armstrong Cooper Youth Hockey to help build athletes with upstanding character, leadership skills, and teamwork abilities! #fortisleaders #leadershiptraining #characterdevelopment

Play multiple sports to increase long-term athletic development potential. We need to resist the temptation to specialize early at the expense of long-term athletic development. #fortisleaders

One of our favorite parts to our Fortis Leaders program is our athlete leadership seminars. In these seminars we get to work with athletes on identifying the leadership challenges their teams face and how they can take ownership to help solve those issues.