Burke Mountain Academy announced on Thursday that the school plans to build a $2.8 million athletic center. The facility will be named for Ronnie Berlack, a student who graduated from the school in 2012 and died in an avalanche in Austria in January 2015.
The academy, an elite ski racing school for high school students, is located at the base of Burke Mountain. About 200 racers train at the private boarding school.
The Ronnie Berlack Center will be located on the academy campus next to the dining hall and will feature a 4,700 square foot training area and a 6,000 square foot turf field. The center will be used for specialized programming including high performance strength and conditioning, sports psychology, sports medicine, nutrition, coaching development and sports science research.
Construction begins this summer and the academy plans to open the facility next fall. The academy led a “silent fundraising” campaign for the project.
Steve Berlack, the father of Ronnie Berlack, started working as a coach at the academy when Ronnie was 4 years old, and he said the new facility is “an incredible tribute” to his son.
“Ski racing and adolescent athletic physical preparation have significantly evolved in the last decade,” Berlack said in a statement. “With this new infrastructure, BMA will be in a strong position to offer consistent year-round indoor training to take our students’ training to a whole new level.”
The academy has launched a new $3 million fundraising campaign for an endowment to support the high performance programs at the new center.
The announcement about the new facility comes at a time when the academy is making a transition in leadership and is faced with changes in the ownership of Burke Mountain Resort.
Kirk Dwyer, who has served as the headmaster of the academy for 16 years, is leaving to take a job as executive director of the Ski and Snowboarding Club Vail, and Jory Macomber, a BMA alum and the former head of USSA Team Academy at Park City, Utah, is taking his place.
Meanwhile, Macomber and Dwyer have been working with the receiver of Burke Mountain Resort to ensure that the school continues to have access to a key racing slope on the mountain. The previous owner, Ariel Quiros, has been accused of defrauding investors in a hotel on the property. The Q Burke Resort expansion, as envisioned by Quiros, originally included not only the hotel, but also an elite athletic center with indoor tennis courts and an Olympic swimming pool. The center was not built.
Michael Goldberg, the court-appointed receiver of the property, has met with the academy and has told the press that he plans to open the new Burke Hotel and resort in the fall. In the meantime, he is showing the property to potential buyers.
Dwyer said in an interview that the academy negotiated an agreement in 2005 that secures the school’s access to the mountain and limits development. If the resort is developed and sold, the academy would receive a $3 million payment from the new owner.
Burke Mountain Academy is hosting an official ground-breaking ceremony for the Ronnie Berlack Center on May 21 at 5:30 p.m. The academy is also holding a send-off that evening from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. for Dwyer.
