‘Can’t believe it’s taken this long’: MODE Prep brings national prep circuit basketball to Spokane

Jon Adams had his dream job as the head boys basketball coach at his alma mater, Coeur d’Alene High School.

He had a state-caliber team and was building the program through the community, down to the youth levels.

But when the school’s administration abruptly relieved him of his duties two weeks before the district tournament this year, Adams was left to wonder what would be next.

As it turns out, he didn’t have to wait long for an exciting and intriguing opportunity just on the other side of the state line.

In early April, Adams was hired as head boys basketball coach at MODE Prep to help build the region’s first national prep circuit boys basketball program, on the MODE Campus in Liberty Lake.

The two national teams will play in showcase tournaments across the country, and players will be housed in a 32,000-square-foot house school organizers are renovating near the campus. Players and their families are responsible for tuition, though scholarships will be available.

MODE founder and owner Luke Kjar is a self-described “entrepreneurial person.” As with many of his enterprises, it’s a big-vision project full of possibility – but also not without questions, especially from those on the outside.

In addition to the two national teams, Liberty Launch Academy – the private K-12 school Kjar founded on the MODE campus – will be entering a boys high school basketball team to compete as a member of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association, in either the 2B or 1B classification.

The school, which just completed its third year, had participants in cross country, wrestling, golf and track and field at the WIAA 1B classification during the 2024-25 school year.

Last year, Liberty Launch had roughly 25 high school students, but there are plans to grow quickly as younger students graduate from the elementary and middle school programs and into the high school. Adding three dozen basketball players or so alone could nearly triple the size of the high school in one year.

Kjar also hopes attention from the national program will trickle down and help his passion project of “educating and developing whole humans” grow at the high school.

In the near future, Kjar hopes to have high school programs in just about all of the sports the WIAA has to offer. But that’s not all – his vision for MODE Prep’s national impact starts with the boys basketball team and includes plans to rapidly expand to national programs in girls basketball, volleyball, soccer and beyond.

The vision

“I love fixing broken things,” Kjar said.

That philosophy has become one of the principals that guided him through a successful business career and drives him in his more philanthropic application.

Kjar has long felt that the education system was broken, all the way back to when he was in school. When his children became school-aged, he and his wife Rebecca thought there had to be a better way. He sold his business, bought a 220,000-square-foot former office building, and built a campus that combined education, retail, business and arts in what he calls “a lifestyle campus” in Liberty Lake.

“It’s where wellness, creativity and community converge, empowering individuals to live with intention and balance,” he said.

Central to that is Liberty Launch Academy.

The high school curriculum is based on what the school calls “learning pathways.” The pathways are designed to provide personalized learning experiences for the high school students. These pathways are project-based and cross-curricular, ensuring that students’ training and academic studies are focused on their specific field of interest. There are six pathways: college, business/entrepreneurship, music, career/trades, athletics/wellness and culinary.

Students meet graduation requirements by earning credits in core subject areas, integrating their passion into academics.

“Hands-on learning is essential to our success and how we teach these kids,” director of basketball Scott Reid said.

Now that the education part of the equation has had a few years to develop, Kjar and the school are jumping into athletics with both feet.

“We didn’t focus on sports initially, because I come from an entrepreneurial mindset of why education needs to be changed – and changed drastically,” Kjar said. “I wanted to do that first.

“I’m building a school I wish I would have had. We are redefining how education should be done at our school and that took some time to do.”

The program

The latest big-picture project for Kjar involves building and promoting a national basketball academy to compete against some of the biggest programs in the business.

Adams was in the right place at the right time to be the architect of the nascent program in a city that calls itself “Hooptown.”

“What we’ve learned is it’s probably been way overdue here,” Adams said. “The ‘prep school’ model has been kind of growing and growing over the last 20 years, and you’re seeing these pop up. And quite honestly, there’s a lot on the East Coast. There aren’t that many on the West Coast. … But now that we’re into it, it’s like, I can’t believe it’s taken this long for an area like Spokane that’s so basketball crazy, has so much talent here, such a desirable place to be – which is some of the checking points of why kids would go to a prep school.”

Adams and Reid are well into finding the first class of national basketball recruits to the program.

“Our intention is we’re recruiting the best of the best right now,” Adams said. “And we know that in order for this to be successful, we do have to be competitive right out of the gate. So that is on me, that’s on us, as far as which kids we are bringing in and making the best nucleus for a team. So our intention is to be very competitive, even in Year 1.”

But in order to be in line with Kjar’s overall vision of the program, the athletes they bring in still have to fit with the overall philosophy. They aren’t interested in bringing in “just basketball players.” MODE Prep players will attend in-person classes at Liberty Launch and will be expected to participate within the community.

Adams acknowledged there might be skepticism about being just another basketball factory, or the potential to pilfer the best local players for MODE Prep.

“That’s not the case,” he said . “In fact, one of the things we’ve already seen is how quickly this spreads across the country, and that the candidates that start to get on our radar are not from here and are from other areas.

“There’s also a huge international component. … So, you know, as far as taking kids locally, there probably will be a kid here, a kid there. But really the breadth of the kids we’re looking at are from all over the globe.”

One of the requisites of the WIAA with regards to a prep circuit model team is a clear delineation between the prep program and the high school team. Reid said those plans are in place, including a separate coaching staff for the high school team.

“There are kids who are going to come to the school who aren’t ‘prep level’ players, but they want to be on a basketball team,” he said. “So we’ll have that high school team that can take local kids, kids that would feed the school anyway.”

Kjar wants to “raise the tide of basketball generally in the area.”

“I think what we bring in facilities and coaches and attention to our team, I want to spread across and benefit the entire community of basketball – and not just be for our school.”

Adams is still rounding out the coaching staffs for the three boys basketball teams, but MODE Prep has made a few significant hires. Jay Mandaquit (recruiting), Vae Fiefia (strength and conditioning) and Shane Hayden (operations) were brought in from regional prep powerhouse Utah Prep in Hurricane, Utah, to help get the new programs off the ground.

The building

Perhaps the most ambitious part of the project falls into those facilities MODE Prep and Liberty Launch Academy can provide now – and in the near future. The school, with its modern campus-like design and plenty of natural light throughout the facility, is in place.

But they don’t have a gym.

For now, MODE Prep will practice at Hub Sports Center and play a mostly road schedule in the 2024-25 season, playing at tournaments across the country. While the two national tours the program is contemplating joining – adidas’ Grind Session or Nike’s EYBL – play much of their schedules in tournament format, program organizers will want to have the ability to host events in Spokane, as well as provide top training facilities for the high school programs.

That will come soon, as the school hopes to break ground later this year on a state-of-the-art 250,000-square-foot facility on the north side of the property.

“We’re getting plans out to the city over the next couple of weeks,” Kjar said. “We’ve worked months on the plan, really fitting it into every square inch of space we have available.”

“It was Luke’s brainchild, to be honest,” Reid said. “But we wanted to incorporate athletics into the community. So we’ll have a full soccer field – indoor and the only one of its kind in the area. We’ll have three or four basketball courts, four volleyball courts, pickleball courts, a full combat training facility for wrestling and mixed martial arts. We’ll be somewhere between college and pro-level facilities – including our dieticians and our kitchen.”

Organizers plan to make the facility available to the community to host all sorts of sporting events and training opportunities. But they also see it as a full community center with the ability to host concerts, farmer’s markets and other events.

“This is not just a one-trick pony,” Reid said. “This is to build a community hub where people gather with purpose and have, you know, a great experience with their families.”

“Nothing drives me more crazy than when we have all these schools paid for, you know, taxpayer facilities that get closed down after school,” Kjar said. “It doesn’t have community flow through them. They don’t have it. They’re just locked down. They’re prisons, almost, to the outsider. And so we are doing the opposite of that. We will squeeze every ounce of community opportunity to come through this space. … We will do all things possible to make this the most incredible community hub in and outside of basketball, in and outside of the sports we do. It’ll just be an awesome, awesome space.”

“That’s what will really set us apart,” Reid said. “The facilities, the opportunity, the size of this project, gym space – all of those things. The ability to train kids two or three times a day, as opposed to a high school as one practice after school. If kids want to play basketball at the next level – and play high-level basketball – this would be the best place they can go.”