“Basketball made me realize I needed to protect my name off the court, too.”

There’s a strange thing that happens to young athletes.

The better they are at their sport, the less people expect of them outside it. Coaches, teachers, even friends begin to treat athleticism as a kind of trade-off—a social currency that excuses or explains everything else.

Amare Spiva noticed this early. Not in any dramatic or defining moment, but in the quiet accumulation of how people spoke to him, how they assumed who he was. He realized he was being flattened. Reduced. Respected for his athleticism—but not for his ideas.

So he changed the game.

He made a quiet decision: if people were going to associate his name with excellence, he would control what that excellence meant.

He studied. He treated his schedule like a playbook. The same way he studied defenses, he studied deadlines. The same attention he gave to film, he gave to feedback.

This wasn’t about trying to impress college recruiters. It was about something more lasting. More difficult.

It was about reclaiming his name.

Amare has reclassified into the class of 2026 and is taking a post-graduate year at Thomas Academy.

 But if basketball disappeared tomorrow, what he’s building wouldn’t vanish with it. He’s charting a path toward Medical School. He’s exploring finance. He’s thinking about generational impact.

Not because it’s expected of him.

But because he’s learned that when the world tries to define you narrowly, the smartest thing you can do… is expand.