Welcome The Philadelphia Youth Football Academy

While it is the dream of student-athletes to play professional sports, the reality is that 99% will not attain this goal and instead may find themselves with a limited education and few opportunities. Aspiring youth need to be set up for success in life regardless of what happens on the field. Understanding and addressing this realism is why the PYFA was created. Our objective is to provide student-athletes a comprehensive year-round curriculum administered in collaboration with the most well respected and accomplished firms in both athletics and academics with the goal of our graduates thriving in college. 

The Philadelphia Youth Football Academy is an innovative sport based youth development approach to increase graduation, attendance and truancy rates of Philadelphia youth attending Philadelphia schools. PYFA curriculum also includes a mentoring component. Our is geared for youth to become informed of and be prepared for the post-secondary and workforce transition process.  PYFA is unique from other sports youth based programs because we are the only program in Philadelphia to offer and will also incorporate sport journalism/photography, mass communication and sport management components. PYFA participants will be paired with professionals from those respected fields.  We will implement an innovative new program models that seeks to engage and motivate youth in a way that is consistent with the opportunities of our technology-focused society, and endow youth with dire skills and academic content in a challenging approach. PYFA has developed supporting materials for our competency based model which personalizes learning for youth through the use of adaptive technology, project-based and applied learning experiences. Youth will collaborate with their mentors to create and complete a “Build Your Sports Career” Project. Youth will learn how to journalists, photographers, talk-show producers, on-air personalities, coaches, administrators, team/store managers, athletic trainers and operations staff, etc.  Over the course of the year, youth build some essential skills: critical thinking, acceptance of constructive criticism, teamwork, resolving issues, and administration.

Why we want to partner with Philadelphia Public Schools (aka "The Public League")

• 23% of Philadelphia residents have graduated from college; Philly ranks 41^st out of the 50 largest cities across this metric
• 76% of students in Philadelphia Public Schools are from economically disadvantaged households
• 31% of students in Philadelphia school districts are from impoverished households; Philadelphia’s 25% overall poverty rate ranks the 6^th highest among the 50 largest cities in the country
•  37% of graduates of the city’s public high schools (not including charter schools) go to college immediately after graduation and about 51% do not go at all