Michael Murray ‘99, Assistant Director of Athletics
Why perspective, effort, attitude, and being a great teammate are critical for long-term success.
A larger conversation about high school athletics in New York is underway, and it has very little to do with a swimming pool, a basketball court, a football field, or a sectional championship. At its heart, the conversation is whether the athletic structures we created decades ago still make sense for the schools and students participating in them today.
I have thought about this a lot over the past several years, both as a coach and as someone with a long history at Albany Academy. I graduated from the Academy in 1999, and after spending much of my professional life coaching and recently working in independent-school athletics, I have a different perspective now than I did as a student. I have had the opportunity to see high school athletics from many different angles, and one thing has become increasingly obvious to me: not every school is built the same way, and our athletic associations should stop pretending they are.
That’s the context in which I view Albany Academy's decision to transition its athletic programs away from the New York State Public High School Athletic Association and Section 2 and toward the New England Preparatory School Athletic Council.
I believe this was a very good institutional decision. I also think it was necessary. That doesn't mean I have lost respect for Section 2 or for the public-school athletic model. Quite the opposite. Section 2 has been an important part of Albany Academy's athletic history, and there are outstanding coaches, athletes and programs throughout the section. Many of us who have spent our careers in New York high school athletics have developed friendships and professional relationships through that system that will last a lifetime.
But there comes a point when an institution has to look honestly at where it is going rather than simply continuing to operate within a structure because that is where it has always been. The contemporary socioeconomic demographic of the capital region has changed dramatically in the last four decades and presents certain challenges to independent schools in the Albany area.
For Albany Academy, this fact has become increasingly important because the school is not a traditional public high school. It is an independent preparatory school with a different admissions model, a different educational mission, a postgraduate program, and a student population that comes to the school by choice rather than by residence. Families intentionally choose to send their children to Albany Academy because they believe the school offers something different.
Our athletics program should be allowed to operate within an environment that recognizes that difference. The private-school argument has become too simplistic. The debate surrounding private schools in NYSPHSAA has become increasingly heated, and I understand why. When an independent school wins a state championship, the discussion often turns immediately toward enrollment boundaries, recruiting, and whether the school has an inherent competitive advantage.
Those are legitimate questions. What I don't think is legitimate is allowing the conversation to become so simplistic that "private" automatically becomes synonymous with "unfair."
The distinction between a public school and an independent school is real. A public school generally serves a defined geographic community. An independent school recruits its student body in the broadest sense of that word by offering an educational experience that families voluntarily choose. That doesn't mean every student is recruited to play a sport. It means the fundamental structure of enrollment is different.
That difference becomes particularly important when we talk about athletics.
A family may choose Albany Academy because of the academic program. They may choose it because of the arts. They may choose it because they want a smaller school environment. They may choose it because of the school's college counseling, its community, its boarding and postgraduate opportunities, or because they believe the culture is a better fit for their child. Athletics may be one factor among many. That’s what independent education is supposed to be.
The problem is that NYSPHSAA has increasingly tried to manage these differences through rules designed to make independent schools fit into a public-school athletic structure.
After nonpublic schools won four of the six New York State girls' basketball championships in 2024, NYSPHSAA created a committee to examine schools without traditional geographic boundaries. The result was a new statewide classification system for nonpublic and charter schools, approved in 2025 and scheduled to begin implementation in the 2026-27 school year. Under the new criteria, a nonpublic school can be reclassified based on factors such as winning percentage and postseason success.
I understand the intent. If a school consistently dominates its classification, there should be a mechanism to address competitive balance. That is not unreasonable.
What concerns me is the larger philosophy behind the approach. We keep adding rules to a system that has a fundamental structural mismatch, and then we are surprised when the debate doesn't go away.
The conversation is no longer simply about whether a private school is good enough to compete; it’s become a debate over how much of an independent school's identity NYSPHSAA is willing to accommodate. These are two very different questions.
One of the most interesting developments in this entire discussion occurred much closer to home. In April 2026, Section 2 was among the NYSPHSAA sections considering whether nonpublic and charter schools should be separated from public schools for postseason competition. A majority of Section 2 schools supported pursuing complete separation.
This is important to me because Section 2 was the environment where Albany Academy competed for many years and was part of my experience as a student.
If the schools within Section 2 are themselves questioning whether public and nonpublic schools should continue competing for the same postseason championships, then I think we need to listen to what they are saying. This isn't simply a private-school complaint. It is a structural question being raised by people who administer and participate in high school athletics every day.
The discussion has continued elsewhere in the state. Section 1 voted overwhelmingly in June 2026 to prevent private, parochial and charter schools from competing against public schools in its postseason tournaments beginning in 2027-28. That decision was subsequently overturned through the NYSPHSAA appeals process, allowing the existing system to continue for now.
To me, that sequence of events illustrates the problem better than any argument I could make. Sections are trying different solutions. NYSPHSAA is developing classification systems. Schools are appealing decisions. The rules continue to evolve, and the debate continues.
At some point, an independent school has to decide whether it wants to spend the next several years trying to determine how it fits into that system or find an athletic environment that already understands its model.
We at Albany Academy selected the second option, which I believe was a forward-thinking decision. One misconception I would like to put to rest is that moving to prep-school athletics represents an attempt to find an easier road. Anyone who understands the NEPSAC athletics landscape knows that isn't the case. If anything, Albany Academy has made its athletic life more difficult. That may sound strange, but I mean it as a compliment.
The move to NEPSAC places our athletes in competition with schools that have serious athletic programs, experienced coaches, strong traditions, and student-athletes who are often every bit as ambitious as our own. In many sports, the level of competition is substantially different from what our athletes experienced previously. That’s exactly what should happen when a school makes this kind of move.
I have always believed athletes improve when they are challenged by people capable of beating them. Swimming is a particularly good example. If I want a swimmer to get better, I don't want every practice and every race to make them feel comfortable. I want them to have to hold a pace they aren't sure they can hold. I want someone in the next lane who makes them work. I want them to discover a weakness they didn't know they had. The same thing is true of an athletic department.
Albany Academy doesn't need to be the biggest fish in the pond. We need to be in a pond that makes us better. That’s one reason I believe the transition to NEPSAC has been so valuable.
The best evidence for whether an institutional decision is working isn't usually found in a press release. It is found in what happens after the decision is made. Albany Academy's first year in NEPSAC provided some pretty compelling evidence.
The boys' swimming and diving team won the 2026 NEPSAC Division II championship, while the girls finished fourth, just five points from third. The championship win was gratifying, but what interested me more was how the season developed.
The athletes had to adjust to a different competitive environment. They had to understand that the schools we were racing had their own traditions, expectations, and athletes who wanted to win. There wasn't a presumption that Albany Academy would walk in and be successful simply because we had been successful somewhere else. We traveled much farther than we had in the past, learned how to study on coach buses, eat meals on the road, and stay overnight in hotels. Through it all, we adapted to the new environment and secured a program-leading GPA. We had to earn it. That’s exactly what athletics should teach young people.
Boys’ Basketball provided a different version of the same lesson. Albany Academy entered NEPSAC Class AA, one of the most competitive prep-school basketball environments in the country. The first season was not a fairy tale. The team finished 9-9 and had to earn its way through a demanding schedule before reaching the postseason, and it may have been the best team we’ve ever had from a talent perspective, and our coaching staff did an exceptional job.
Some people will look at that record and see a program that was better off somewhere else. We look at it differently. If you have been winning easily and suddenly find yourself playing .500 basketball because the competition is significantly better, that may actually be evidence that you made the right move.
The question isn't whether the record looks better. The question is whether the athletes are improving.
NEPSAC feels like a natural fit for Albany Academy for a reason. The schools understand one another; we understand independent education, and we understand that families make choices. The conference understands that students may come from different geographic communities. NEPSAC also understands postgraduate education and that athletics can be a significant part of the student experience without being the entire reason a student attends a school.
NEPSAC is a large and established organization representing more than 180 independent schools and offering championship opportunities across a wide range of sports.
This is also the language of good coaching.
I have never believed that the most important thing a coach does is teach a child how to swim faster, shoot better, run faster or score more goals. Those things matter, and our athletes deserve excellent coaching. But the larger responsibility is teaching young people how to prepare, respond to adversity, accept accountability, work with others, and become comfortable being uncomfortable. The competition should reinforce the educational mission rather than exist separately from it.
There is a larger philosophical issue here that I think deserves more attention: independent schools are different. That’s why families choose them. We shouldn't be embarrassed by that.
Albany Academy has students who come from a broad geographic area. We have a postgraduate program; we have families who deliberately seek an independent educational environment; we have programs and opportunities that are different from those available in many public schools.
None of those things should automatically be considered an athletic advantage that needs to be neutralized; rather, these are characteristics of the institution. The more significant question is whether those characteristics are being used within a set of rules that everyone understands and accepts.
In NEPSAC, the answer is much closer to yes because the schools are operating within a common understanding of independent education. That’s an important distinction. Fairness does not mean making every institution identical.
Sometimes fairness means putting institutions with similar structures into competition with one another. We understand that concept everywhere else in sports. NCAA athletics have divisions, professional sports have leagues, youth sports have age groups and classifications.
Nobody argues that those structures are unfair because not every team competes against every other team. Our athletics department recognizes that competitive environments work best when the participants have enough in common for the competition to be meaningful. High school athletics should be capable of the same sophistication.
This is where I think NYSPHSAA's thinking has become somewhat myopic.
I don't question the organization's commitment to high school athletics, nor do I question the people who volunteer their time or the administrators who are trying to manage a complicated statewide system. However, I do question whether the organization is trying too hard to preserve one athletic structure when New York's educational landscape has changed.
The state now has traditional public schools, large suburban districts, small rural schools, charter schools, religious schools, independent schools, boarding schools and postgraduate programs. Those institutions don't all operate under the same educational model.
Yet the athletic system continues to spend enormous energy trying to determine how to make them fit together.
Albany Academy isn't becoming more or less independent because of a classification formula. We are an independent school because of how the institution operates, and that isn't going to change; so why should our athletic future depend upon repeatedly modifying a public-school athletic system to accommodate us?
I appreciate something else about this decision. Moving into NEPSAC doesn't guarantee success; it certainly doesn't guarantee championships, it also doesn't guarantee that every athlete will get recruited to college, and it doesn't guarantee that Albany Academy will win more games.
In fact, it guarantees quite the opposite: our athletes will lose sometimes, our teams may struggle, and coaches will have to adjust. Our programs will have to become more sophisticated, and we will have to recruit and retain great coaches.
We have to improve our facilities and resources; build relationships with new schools; and learn how NEPSAC works. Great programs like Boys’ Lacrosse and great coaches like Doug McIver serve as invaluable resources during this transition.
Young people don't grow because everything goes according to plan. They grow because they are placed in environments that require them to adapt. I think institutions work the same way.
Our goal will not simply be to win championships. This may be the most important distinction of all. Of course we want to win; coaches who say they don't care about winning are usually not being completely honest. Winning matters because it reflects preparation, execution, commitment, and teamwork. But winning isn't the purpose of an educational athletic program. The purpose is to develop young people through competition. That means our measure of success has to be larger than a championship banner.
Did the freshman become a better athlete? Did the senior or PG learn how to lead? Did the student-athlete who struggled throughout the season learn how to handle disappointment? Did the team become more connected? Did a young person discover that they were capable of more than they thought? Did they learn to appreciate a teammate whose background was different from their own? Did they learn how to receive difficult feedback from a coach without taking it personally?
Those are the outcomes that follow students long after their athletic careers are over, and those are exactly the outcomes a prep-school environment should prioritize.
There’s obviously a college component to all of this.
Albany Academy wants its student-athletes to have opportunities to compete at the collegiate level, and our athletes deserve to be seen by college coaches. The move into prep-school athletics creates more opportunities for that exposure because our students compete against and build relationships with schools throughout the Northeast. 17% of our student-athletes move on to compete on NCAA teams during their collegiate careers.
In 2026, Albany Academy celebrated 14 seniors who committed to continue their athletic careers in college. That’s worth celebrating. But I don't think the number should become the measure of whether the athletic program is successful.
The more important question is whether we are developing young people who are ready for whatever comes after Albany Academy. If they go on to compete in college, that's wonderful. If they decide that their athletic career ends at graduation and they discover a passion for engineering, business, medicine, teaching, art, public service, or something that doesn't exist yet, that's wonderful too. Our responsibility is to prepare them.
College should be the next step, not the definition of the entire journey. There’s a bigger institutional opportunity here that excites me about this transition, and it’s not actually the league affiliation. It’s what this decision allows Albany Academy to become.
When an institution commits to competing against schools that are operating at a higher level, it creates pressure to improve everything around the program. Coaching becomes more important, scheduling becomes more intentional. Strength and conditioning become more sophisticated and athletic training becomes more important. Facilities matter and technology matters. Recruiting and admissions need to communicate effectively. Alumni engagement becomes more meaningful.
Most importantly, the culture has to become stronger. You cannot simply change the logo on the schedule and call yourself a prep-school athletic program. The experience has to change, and the expectations have to change. Our students have to understand that they are part of something larger than themselves.
That is the opportunity Albany Academy now has. Institutionally, we have to think beyond our past and Section 2/NYSPHSAA. I have tremendous respect for Albany Academy's history in Section 2, but I don't believe we should allow that history to dictate our future.
The school has already demonstrated that it is willing to think differently in academics, student life, its postgraduate program, and how it approaches the institution's future. Athletics should be no different.
The transition to NEPSAC gives Albany Academy the opportunity to build an athletic program around its actual identity rather than constantly explaining why it doesn't fit neatly into somebody else's definition. That’s a healthy thing for the Academy.
Our student-athletes deserve to compete in an environment where the schools understand one another; they deserve opponents that challenge them, and they deserve coaches who can push them. Most of all, they deserve an athletic experience that’s consistent with the education they are receiving in the classroom.
Our future is larger than any championship, and though I don't know exactly what Albany Academy athletics will look like ten years from now, I know what I want it to look like.
I want our student-athletes to be proud of the school they represent. I want them to compete against people who make them better. I want our coaches to be respected professionals, given the resources and support they need to do their jobs well, and I want our teams to be known for how they compete, not simply for what they win.
And I want our student-athletes to leave Albany Academy understanding that athletics was never just about athletics; it was about becoming a great teammate, one who values a positive attitude, and nothing less than their best effort.
The Academy did not leave Section 2 to avoid competition. We left because we recognized that the competitive environment around it was changing and that the school's long-term interests were better served by aligning itself with independent schools that share its educational mission.
NYSPHSAA will keep discussing classifications, eligibility, postseason access, and the involvement of nonpublic schools. These conversations will likely go on for years, and I hope they do. They raise important questions that need careful consideration.
Albany Academy doesn't need to wait for those answers; we have an opportunity to define our own future.
For me, that is what "leveling up" really means. It isn't about leaving something behind because it wasn't good enough; it’s about recognizing that the next challenge should be harder than the last one. We have to accept that there will be some discomfort along the way.
Albany Academy has made a decision about the kind of school it wants to be and the kind of experience it wants to provide its students. Our athletic future should reflect that decision.
For me, the move to NEPSAC is not about finding a better place to win. It’s about finding a better place to grow, and if we do that well, the championships will take care of themselves.
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