Iliad Athletics

09/11/2026

What makes us different?

◾ Functional Physical Fluency, Not Participation
We train for functional fitness and measurable physical competency. Participation is important but not sufficient. Student fitness improves by training across four core training blocks.
◾Objective Standards
We benchmark student performance using objective standards. Students achieve Bronze/Silver/Gold/Black giving them a clear evaluation, feedback, and measuring progress toward goals.
◾Character Formation
Every session integrates a deliberate character-building framework and/or tie-in connecting physical challenge to classical virtues. Character development is woven into the curriculum and pedagogical approaches.
www.iliadadthletics.com

09/08/2026

“In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them…”
-Theodore Roosevelt, "The Strenuous Life"

09/04/2026

We held our first Coaches' Call of the year yesterday and were joined by a dedicated corps of teachers from around the country. These are the folks who are really doing something to reinvigorate the physical culture of America.

Coaches' Calls bring together teachers running the Iliad Athletics PE curriculum for ongoing training, support, and camaraderie.
Stay Frosty!

09/03/2026

We just completed an Iliad Athletics day camp in Indianapolis. At one point the team I was with went about a quarter of a mile the wrong direction after misreading the map.

It was 95 degrees out and they were lugging a 5 gallon water jug. My job was not to point out their mistake...just to accompany and observe. They eventually figured it out and corrected course.

I remember almost twenty years ago as a Lance Corporal in the United States Marine Corps Infantry leading a squad on a two hour goose chase through the hills and rivers of the Jungle Warfare Training Center in Japan because I mistook mils for degrees on my compass.

A Staff NCO who was with us climbed every hill, crawled under every branch and through every river right alongside the rest of us...much harder terrain and much longer than a mere quarter of a mile.

It's one of the great privileges of my work today to be able to strive to live up to the example of those Marines who taught me.

09/02/2026

Iliad founder and CEO on the Furrows Podcast: Patrick Whalen spent a decade in the Marine Corps, founded a boys' boarding school on a Kansas farm, and now builds physical education curriculum for classical schools through Iliad Athletics.

He tells Ryan Klopak and Alex Julian how a candlelit reading of Ecclesiastes, a wagon crash into a chain-link fence post, and The Song of Roland read over ci**rs all point at one conviction: that formation runs through the body, and abstraction is what happens when it doesn't.

What's in This Episode:

Why Patrick credits the dinner table over any classroom he sat in, and what his educator parents told him about report cards
Saint Gregory's Academy: sixty boys, no electronics, and a folk-music culture that turned a self-declared non-singer into a musician
Busking through Rome as a juggling troupe, and the old puppeteer who kept twelve boarding-school boys from getting jumped in an alley
Reading The Song of Roland with Marines before a deployment, and why "do you blow the horn" was the only question worth pressing
The chess-and-burpees day camp where the least athletic kid on the team won the game in three moves.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3LoFluzlyAf8lh99PxVPPy

09/02/2026

Students need hard, physical work that teaches patience and responsibility and impresses upon them the limits of human will.

08/28/2026

We're transmitting a physical culture to the next generation whether we like it or not. The two pictures offer two different paths. The question is which way are we going?

The physical practices of a people create its physical culture and establish the norms or standards which imprint or engrave their characteristics even on the young who have yet to contribute their part.

I think we're at a critical point in the development of our physical culture in America. There is a tendency away from the fresh, real, and raw, and toward the inert, apathetic, sterile, and stifled. Do our kids have the opportunity for unstructured free play with their peers after school, or during recess? Do they come home to play outside or do they vegetate in front of a screen? What do they see us, the adults, doing? Do they cook and eat and complete chores alongside family members, or do they withdraw from one another into headphones and much easier "virtual relationships?"

I think the good news is that a robust physical culture is not just healthier, it's also more enjoyable and more attractive.

We're for vigor, sunshine, fresh air, real food, sweat, and the civic responsibility to pass along a wholesome physical culture to the generations to come.
www.iliadathletics.com

08/26/2026

It's not about you! It's about you too.
This is physical culture for building a nation of willing and able citizens.
www.iliadathletics.com

08/25/2026

We're committed to Iliad Athletics serving as America's Physical Culture Department.
We are at work building a sorely needed physical culture among the young. The seeds of learning fall on the soil of physical culture. No ideal for personal conduct or civilizational achievement can germinate in impoverished soil. The physical culture will determine which ideals are realized, and which will fail. Ultimately, the physical culture will determine what we take to be ideals at all.

08/21/2026