By Kyle Coppola
Mount Dora High School Debuts Renovated Athlete Performance Center
Mount Dora High School has been around a long time. So too has the infrastructure surrounding the school. The Athletics department has been attempting to revitalize the sports at MDH for the past few years and Principal Marlene Straughan has been instrumental in getting the facilities up to par.
The performance center was one of those items that the school needed to improve in order to provide their students with the best chance to compete with schools like The Villages, Leesburg, South Sumter and Lake Minneola who have been on the rise the last few years. Mount Dora High made it their mission to provide the kids with the best equipment possible for success.
So after last year in which the football team had their best season in over a decade, the High School focused on renovating the performance center. The building was solid and did not need to be replaced but the interior and equipment needed to be redone.
Head coach Luke Hutchinson who is now in his 2nd year with the program was very happy with the way the enhancements came out. He pointed to the fact that “The refurbishment will allow our team to practice more effectively and get the guys excited to be in here.” The team was going through off-season workouts and all the kids looked excited for the season.
I saw Quarterback Jake Sepe going especially hard as he gets set to take over the reins as starting quarterback for Mount Dora in 2023. The new performance center also has a film study room where the players and coaches can fine tune anything they see pop up during games that need to be worked on.
The room also features a new section devoted to team captains. The team captains will be listed each year going forward on one of the walls in the performance center. The wall gives the underclassmen something to play for so that one day, perhaps they too may get a chance to have their name up on the Team Captain wall.
The Canes have a young offensive line this season and I noticed a lot of the big guys putting in some hard work outside the facility. Overall I would say that the atmosphere is upbeat. Principal Marlene Straughan has been quoted as saying “We are currently the #1 ranked high school in Lake County! This is thanks to the hard work and efforts of our amazing faculty and staff, students, parents, and community stakeholders. I believe it’s also thanks to the belief that we truly are, One Team. While there is still work to be done, we have a lot to celebrate and be proud of.”
We are very excited about Mount Dora High. This program once won 20 games in a row back in the early 1950s. This is a team with a ton of history and we hope the program will be able to have one of its best seasons of the modern era. Go Hurricanes!
Kyle Coppola was born in Newton, Massachusetts and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Communications from Curry College in 2016. After traveling to Florida on a family vacation, he decided he could not get enough of the warm weather and made the move from snowy Massachusetts to central Florida 8 years ago.
For the last decade Kyle has gained valuable experience in social media content creation, marketing and sales, writing, video production, sports announcing and even broadcasting for local radio stations, such as FM 102.9 in The Villages and FM 91.5 in Massachusetts. Every year he volunteers at The Villages Charter High School as a play-by-play sports announcer for the football games as well as a public address announcer for the basketball games, including the annual Battle at The Villages Tournament.
Outside the office Kyle is a husband and father to two beautiful girls along with their cat. In his spare time he likes to spend time with his family, travel, play golf and swim. He is also a huge sports junkie and even bigger motorsports fan and loves to attend racing events when he can.
