Michael Long wasn’t a bad kid, just too smart for his own good. His tumultuous early years were split between the opposing worlds of his divorced parents — a rural life of “alligators, airboats, shotguns and country music” with his father in Myakka; a life of responsibilities inherited too young with his mother, who’d been severely injured in a car accident, in Sarasota.
…..When his first choice, New College of Florida, rejected him, he petitioned for a reconsideration and got in. There he found kids with “completely different lives, who were 1,000 times smarter than me.”……
….Well before graduating in 2014 with a degree in public policy, Long had established Sail Future, a501c3 to use sailing as a spark for transformational change. But his target market was not the relatively benign high school population.