The Summer the Olympics Came to Them

They came for a week of training on the Côte d'Azur. They left having watched the best players in the world compete for Olympic gold.

In the summer of 2024, a group of IMG Academy student-athletes and their parents joined Maison du Volley for a programme built around the south of France — mornings on the court, afternoons discovering the coast, evenings around long tables that turned teammates into something closer to family. The training was serious. The setting made it feel like anything but a chore.

Then came Paris. With the Olympic Games underway just a train ride from the coast, the group traded the beach for the stands — indoor volleyball and beach volleyball, both, played by athletes most of the girls had only ever watched on a screen. Parents who'd come along for the trip found themselves just as moved as their daughters; there's a particular kind of quiet that falls over a stadium when a rally goes on a beat too long for anyone to breathe.

It's the moment the whole programme is designed around, even when it isn't an Olympic year: the instant a young player stops picturing herself as a spectator of the sport and starts picturing herself inside it. For this group, that instant had a gold medal hanging over it.

The training on the Riviera taught technique. Paris taught scale — what the sport looks like at its absolute highest level, and how close that world actually is. Several of the girls have said since that the trip changed how they watch volleyball entirely. That's usually how you know a programme did its job.