When junior Karson Reeder stepped off the mound in the fifth inning of the UIL Class 6A Division II state championship game last June, he had thrown his last pitch for Tomball High School.
Instead of returning to Tomball for his senior season and perhaps a third trip to state, Reeder enrolled at The Bennett School, a baseball-centered institution powered by the Texas Sports Academy and the Austin-based AI-propelled Alpha School.
Reeder, who has signed to play with the University of Texas, said the decision to leave Tomball was not made lightly.
“I can get all the development I need with the best coaches,” he said. “I’ve been there, done that, and I don’t have to over-pitch, throw another 100 innings. I think it’s a good opportunity and play against the best and not just dominate the teams that are not as good. Get in there, play the best competition, really prepare yourself.”
The Bennett School is the first high school and middle school sports academy of its kind in the Houston area. Utilizing the Alpha School curriculum — a two-hours-per-day learning model powered by artificial intelligence — students are able to complete the academic portion of their day in the morning and spend the afternoon focusing on baseball development.
Texas Sports Academy is essentially the athletics division of the Alpha School. With several locations across Texas — including Dallas, Austin and San Antonio — the organization has schools focused on multiple activities, from basketball to gymnastics to martial arts. The Bennett School has gained notoriety since its opening for its untraditional academic structure, but also because several of the top high school baseball players in the Houston area have chosen to join the program.
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Alpha School and Texas Sports Academy officials say the AI-based programs they use can help accelerate and boost learning in a variety of ways. According to Lamar Cannon, the head of partnerships for Texas Sports Academy, one of the biggest benefits the academic structure offers is giving what was previously classroom time back to the students and their and families. It’s one of the most distinct departures from traditional schooling, which requires more hours during the day.
“We believe that model is kind of outdated,” said Cannon, the brother of former Texans and Patriots offensive lineman Marcus Cannon. “A lot of students, if you talk to them, you realize that they’re wasting six hours a day in school. We’re kind of giving the kids their time back. Students are able to learn two to six times faster with this academic structure than with traditional school because there’s individualized tutoring that happens with the AI app. It meets the students where they’re at.”
The Alpha School website makes several claims about its effectiveness, including that its students experience 2.6-times-faster growth than peers on nationally normed Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) tests and that a majority of them consistently outperform national averages. It also says the top performers achieve up to 6.5-times faster growth.
When vouching for the Alpha School efficacy, Cannon referenced the “2 Sigma Problem” study, conducted by Benjamin Bloom, an American educational psychologist, in 1984. The primary takeaway from that study was that students who receive one-on-one tutoring perform 98% better than traditionally taught peers. It also asserts that mastery of a topic before moving forward is critical, and that veering from that concept can create learning gaps. The “problem” part of the study is that tutoring can be too expensive and resource-intensive to provide to everyone. The Alpha School claims to have solved that using AI.
“From this Bloom study, the conclusion was that this is the best way to teach kids, but it’s not scalable,” Cannon said. “We can’t have a classroom with 25 teachers, and we can’t have one teacher for every student in the United States. So the study was kind of ignored. But now, with AI, it’s possible to have individualized learning and for students to get that same tutoring.”
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Tuition at The Bennett School is currently $15,000, which is significantly cheaper than the most expensive private school options in Houston, according to data compiled by the Chronicle. The school is also eligible for the statewide voucher program that was passed through legislation as Senate Bill 2 last spring. Formally known as the Texas Education Freedom Accounts (TEFA), they provide families with taxpayer funds to offset the cost of private or homeschool education. Launching with the 2026-27 school year, eligible children can receive more than $10,000 per year toward tuition at accredited private schools.
The Bennett School meets the required criteria for the voucher program, which has been pushed by Gov. Greg Abbott for several years. Those opposed to the program have raised concerns that it takes funding away from the public school system. Funding for Texas public schools is based on attendance, and even small reductions can lead to significant cutbacks. Districts across the state have to budget for a lot of fixed costs, including teacher and support staff pay, facilities operations and more.
The rise of sports academies in Texas has been met with opposition from the Texas High School Coaches Association, which issued a letter to its members in February titled “Educate. Excel. Play: A Call to Action to Protect Education-Based Athletics in the State of Texas.” It includes a checklist for high school coaches and administrators to follow in regard to the sports academies, which the organization’s leaders believe are a threat to the fabric of community-driven high school athletics. The decree from the THSCA includes not scheduling games with teams from the academies and not allowing them to rent public school facilities. It also emphasizes educating parents and promoting and reinforcing the value of public school athletics.
THSCA executive director Joe Martin said that because of the decisions made by legislators regarding the voucher program, public school administrators and coaches feel like they need to recruit their own kids simply to pay the bills.
“We feel like those academies are taking kids out of public schools, and it impacts budgets,” Martin said. “So we got together with the other associations in the state of Texas and came up with a plan to promote public schools, not to attack academies. We don’t want to change their narrative. We just want to educate everybody on ours. We want to educate everybody on all the great things public schools are doing and what our coaches are doing for our high school athletes in this state.”
Joshua Childs, a former college athlete who’s now an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas, said academies like The Bennett School are challenging the way school has traditionally been viewed and have created a new way to package academics with sports for young athletes aspiring to compete at the next levels.
“I think, especially since the pandemic, since 2020, the options of what schooling can look like have obviously expanded,” said Childs, who’s also a member of the communication and collaboration advisory committee for the Texas High School Coaches Association and helps the organization design curriculum for its coaches. “Parents have recognized that they have more choices and there’s more options available for how their students can learn and will learn. So I think what we’re seeing now is a shift in what education can and will look like in the future. I think the Alpha School is just one of those examples of what the market, especially in Texas, has allowed, which is the creation and expansion of a schooling model like that.”
According to Childs, the “million dollar question” is about the middle ground between traditional education and innovative options like the Alpha School. Can the gap be bridged, or are the two concepts too foreign? What kind of long-term impact will these issues have on high school athletics and the students, coaches, administrators and parents involved in them?
“I think there are more questions to be asked, but I would also say that parents and families and communities are wanting options and choices, and that I think this should be a sort of a wake-up call for those of us who care about our traditional education, our traditional public schools,” Childs said. “It’s an opportunity to really do some internal reflection about what works and what doesn’t work. And one thing that does work really well, especially in the state of Texas, is our athletics — the ways in which our public schools engage in athletics and education-based athletics. So I think there’s an avenue and a path to think about how our traditional schools can stay relevant and continue to do well and prosper.”
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Tomball coach Doug Rush started coaching in 1986 and has seen how high school athletics have evolved. He believes baseball and other sports might follow in the footsteps of soccer, where Texas coaches have been battling to keep their top players from ditching the high school season in favor of playing exclusively for their club teams. Rush said that high school baseball and select baseball have co-existed for years, giving kids the opportunity to compete in both. But he believes that with the advent of academies like The Bennett School, that dynamic has begun to change.
“They just can’t really call themselves a high school,” Rush said. “It’s not high school sports. It’s just select sports, showcase sports that have been extended into the high school seasons because people found a way, or found a loophole, to make money, and that’s what they do. So they sell it as something where, if you don’t play with the elite, you’re not going to get a look (from colleges). It’s fine if they go do that. I just don’t believe schools like that belong in high school rankings. I don’t even believe they should be playing other high schools because they recruit, and they openly recruit. It is what it is. It’s fine if we have those, and I give my blessing to any kid who wants to go do it, but it’s not high school. It’s a loophole around high school.”
It’s a long and fascinating story, and you should read the whole thing, it’s a gift link. I honestly don’t know what to make of it right now. I should note before I go further that the claims of academic achievement made by the Bennett School and its siblings have not yet been subject to rigorous study, and of course we have no idea yet what the long-term implications of its model may be. I’m open to the idea that this kind of model can work very well for some number of students. I’m skeptical about the AI/self-study/virtual school part of it, and I know fully well that in the absence of strong regulations and oversight that something like this will be fertile ground for all kinds of grifters. Especially with the sports angle, as we have already seen too many examples already of questionable/bogus sports academies – two words: Bishop Sycamore – and the scams they have enabled. There are also big questions about equity that don’t get touched on at all.
That said, there’s a lot of movement in sports towards the use of technology and virtual environments for athletic development, so it makes sense for this to filter down to the high school level. Baseball in particular has seen a lot of the advancements in analytics and training migrate to college programs, which is supported by MLB because it’s basically outsourcing a lot of player development to college programs. That’s one reason why MLB has been moving towards shrinking the minor leagues – why should they pay to develop young players when the NCAA can do it for them, much as it has long done for the NFL. Moving this another notch down to high school, where players are immediately eligible for the MLB draft upon their graduation, makes perfect sense.
That may be great for the players who can get drafted, or who can put themselves on the radar for top college programs and NIL money, but it may also reduce opportunities for the kids who for now at least fill out the rest of the collegiate and minor league lineups. It also raises questions about the role of high schools in the social development of these kids – how prepared will they be for the real world and the rest of their lives, especially outside of baseball, if they’re not regularly interacting with people who aren’t in the same bubble. I certainly have my concerns with any further splintering of community into even more niche interests. But I don’t know how much weight to give to providing the opportunity to maximize one’s talents to those who would benefit from it. As I said up front, I don’t know what to make of this. I have questions, but I don’t know that the answers are obtainable yet. Here are the websites for the Sports Academy and the Bennett School if you want to do some more reading.