Meet Loomis Chaffee, the New England boarding school that is producing Power 5 prospects

About seven miles north of Hartford, Conn., located on the confluence of the Connecticut and Farmington rivers, a co-ed, college preparatory boarding school sits on 300 acres of land.

The Loomis Chaffee School has about 740 students enrolled. Its inception dates back to 1874 when five siblings lost all of their children — all before the age of 21 — and together, decided to use their enormous fortune to charter a school that would serve students aged 12 to 20, regardless of their socioeconomic background.

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For decades, Loomis Chaffee has been known for its top academics and well-rounded experience for students, who hail from 33 states and 50 countries. Jason Wu, who famously designed former First Lady Michelle Obama’s gown for the 2009 inauguration — at just 26 years old — graduated from the school in 2001.

Now, Loomis Chaffee is making a name for itself elsewhere, as well.

“I think as far as national exposure from a football perspective, it definitely has been in the last couple of years where Loomis has kind of been propelled into that,” said coach Adam Banks, who recently completed his first season at the school. “It’s been a school that’s kind of been really solid in just about everything athletically, and it’s obviously a great school. But in terms of the national attention that the school is getting right now from (football) programs, I think that’s fairly new.”

Three-star defensive end Paris Shand was the program’s first Power 5 prospect in more than a decade when he signed with Arizona in the Class of 2020. (He has since transferred to LSU.) There were no Power 5 signees from Loomis in 2021, but the school produced five over the next two recruiting classes, most notably Class of 2023 four-star offensive tackle Olaus Alinen, who is off to Alabama to play for Nick Saban.

Then there’s the Class of 2024: Loomis features top-100 prospect Jacob Smith, an edge rusher, and his twin brother Jerod, a four-star defensive linemen, as well as four-star quarterback Dante Reno and three-star athlete Jaiden Spearman. Reno is committed to South Carolina, while the Smith twins have 20-plus offers each, including from Alabama, Georgia and Notre Dame.

P5 signees/prospects from Loomis Chaffee

“My second day on campus (last year) was the first day of the winter contact period,” Banks said laughing, referring to the frequent calls from college recruiters. “So that was pretty hectic.”

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Banks replaced Jeff Moore, who coached at Loomis from 2019 through 2021 before accepting a position as the tight ends coach and recruiting coordinator at UMass.

Loomis’ emergence as a football power is evidence that there’s no singular path for a recruit to reach the college ranks. The school — which awards about $12 million of financial aid every year, to one-third of the students — has players from Canada, Africa and Europe.

In many ways, this pipeline to Power 5 schools might just be getting started.

“Loomis … that was definitely a good choice to go there,” Alinen said from his native Finland over FaceTime last month. “(My) boarding school phase is kind of random. I didn’t really expect that to happen. But I really wanted to play college football for sure.”

Alinen grew up in Pori, Finland, about three hours northwest of Helsinki on the country’s west coast.

His father, Klaus, played in the NFL Europe League and spent one season on the Atlanta Falcons practice squad. In that regard, the younger Alinen had plenty of familiarity with American football. But it wasn’t until middle school that Olaus decided he wanted to pursue a career in the states earlier than initially expected. So he started to look into attending an American boarding school.

He considered The Brook Hill School in Texas, as well as other schools in New England, including Salisbury School, Choate Rosemary Hall and The Taft School, all in Connecticut, before settling on Loomis Chaffee.

“Looking back, Choate had a more convincing track record for sure to go there for football,” Alinen said.

But Moore — and his ability to recruit — made the difference.

“One hundred percent,” Alinen said. “That’s really what it came down to. … The way he was able to present things really was fully what convinced me to go there.”

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Alinen said Moore recruited him similarly to the way college coaches operate and sold him on the future of the program. Loomis Chaffee went 2-7 in 2017 and 1-8 in 2018 before Moore arrived in 2019. The program hadn’t had more than three or four winning seasons in the previous 25 years, Moore estimated.

Still, Moore, who had previously coached at St. Thomas More, another boarding school in Connecticut, had a hunch about Loomis Chaffee’s bigger picture when he accepted the job.

“The situation was set up for success,” he said. “They had a varsity weight room. They had a full-time strength coach. They had a lot of great assistants that were on staff. And there were a lot of things put in place, where if there were just a couple of small adjustments, I thought we had the chance to be really special there.”

Moore communicated that vision to Alinen and linked up with him through connections with Gridiron Imports, a nonprofit organization that helps football players from around the world find opportunities to play in the United States. Alinen said it wasn’t financially feasible for his family to make a trip from Finland to the United States to visit every school he considered, so the first time he saw Loomis Chaffee’s campus was also his first day as a student.

But virtual tours helped. So did Moore’s relentless quest to add talent to the roster.

“He’s a really good recruiter,” Reno said. “He made graphics, he made videos, we did Zoom calls. He did so much stuff just to get us all here. But it worked. Loomis is a great spot.”

It also didn’t hurt that Moore had plenty of connections in college football after sending players from St. Thomas More to schools such as Penn State, Michigan, Clemson, Florida, Rutgers, Arizona and UCLA.

At the time he signed the paperwork to attend Loomis, Alinen was the highest-ranked prospect in program history. He admits that he was initially concerned that he wouldn’t have enough high-level players to compete against in practice. But then Moore brought in the Smith twins along the defensive line. And Reno, the son of Yale coach Tony Reno, at quarterback. Reno estimated that Loomis had 20 future Division I starters on its 2021 team that won nine games, including a victory over previously undefeated Milton Academy in the most prestigious postseason game in the New England Prep School Athletic Conference.

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When Moore left after the 2021 season for the college ranks, he promised his team that it would be in good hands with the next coach. Banks arrived at Loomis with a strong resume, having coached at both Georgetown University, his alma mater, and, most recently, Amherst College.

He wasted no time in proving Moore right and guided Loomis to an 8-1 record in 2022, highlighted by a victory in the NEPSAC’s No. 2 postseason game, the Mark Conroy Bowl.

“(Coach Moore) was really the biggest supporter I had there at the school and the reason I came there and we were really close,” Alinen said. “So I was kind of hesitant when he left. It obviously was sad. And then I was thinking about going to a different school as well for a moment.

“Then coach Banks got hired and I reached out to him and we had a conversation and he had a good track record, too. … I really tried to take a positive approach to the coaching transition and just do my job and let the coaches take care of coaches’ things and I would just focus on me as a player and winning as a team. And it worked out well. I really enjoyed working with coach Banks, as well.”

In many ways, Loomis Chaffee’s rise appears sudden.

Prior to Moore’s tenure, Pelicans players mostly went on to play in the Ivy League, the Patriot League or various Division III schools.

But in other ways, rising to prominence in athletics has been years in the making.

Head of School Sheila Culbert — who plans to retire after the 2023-24 academic year — is from England and did not grow up on American football. She now loves watching the sport but admits she has historically leaned toward the academic side of a student’s educational experience.

When she was hired as the seventh head of school and president of the Loomis Institute in July 2008, though, she understood what type of situation she was walking into from an athletics standpoint. Loomis won a combined three games in 2006 and 2007 and went winless in 2008.

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“It comes down to a belief, really a philosophy, that if we are going to have sports teams, that we ought to be able to have at least a 50-50 chance at the beginning of any season that the students can win,” Culbert said. “There is nothing more demoralizing than having a losing season time after time after time.

“I think that when I became head about 15 years ago, that was the experience of the school.”

Culbert credits Moore for the “very, very critical” role he played in transforming Loomis and certainly his prowess as a “wonderful recruiter.” But she also believes that Loomis started heading in the right direction under former coach Chuck Reid, who oversaw the program from 2009 through 2016, which included a 6-3 record in 2013 and a 6-2 record in 2014.

“He really started to change the direction,” Culbert said. “We had had something like 20 years of losing seasons and that’s just not fun for anybody. And it was really Chuck who started to make the changes that were necessary.”

Among those changes included increasing the emphasis on strength and conditioning and adding to the size of the coaching staff. Moore reaped the benefits when he took over in 2019 and inherited a pristine weight room that Loomis had repurposed from one of its gyms, as well as a full-time strength and conditioning coach available for students at all hours of the day and resources to support a staff of nine coaches — one for every position.

“We have Division I facilities,” Reno said. “So it’s awesome.”

Then there’s the boarding school experience, the rigorous academics and the holistic approach that Loomis Chaffee pitches to recruits, as well. Banks, like his predecessors, lives on campus with his family. Community is a crucial part of the experience.

“There’s a story I like to tell and maybe it’s a bit cheesy but a couple of years ago, I was at a football game and the whole cast of the fall play turned out, in costume, to cheer on (the football team). I said, ‘What are you guys doing?”‘ Culbert recalled. “They said, ‘Well they always come to our plays. And so we wanted to come out and have a visible demonstration of our support for them.’ And I think that’s the kind of school we are.”

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Reno said that a typical day starts with a team breakfast around 8 a.m., followed by class at 8:30 a.m. Class runs until about 9:45 a.m., ahead of a free period until around 10:45 a.m., during which players either stretch and rehabilitate with the trainers or work out in the pool. Then it’s the second block of classes, lunch, third and fourth block and film for players with a free period at that time. Class typically ends around 3:20 p.m., with practice running from around 3:45 p.m. to 5:20 p.m. Dinner, study hall and film follow, before Reno says the students have a little bit of free time to “be high school students” toward the end of the day.

Banks said that his players are attractive to college programs because they are independent — having already lived away from home — and understand structure and time management. There was still snow on the ground when he was hired at this time a year ago and started moving in with his family. As he followed a couple of his new players on Twitter, he noticed that they had been hounding a couple of groundskeepers to shovel areas of the football field so they could work out together outside.

“That was the first thing that kind of caught my eyes with these guys,” he said.

Now it’s his job to keep things going, starting with the Smith twins this year, who figure to have one of the higher-profile recruitments in school history.

“The challenge is trying to keep players that attract those (college recruiters) and keep those (recruiters) walking through the door. That’s my responsibility,” Banks said. “It’s a great time to be at Loomis, especially to be part of the program here. … We’ve got a great staff got, a ton of great players. So it’s just at this point, we’ve gotta live up to it.”

(Photo courtesy of Loomis Chaffee School)

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