The Florida Gators
TNXL Academy schools kids in baseball, shakes up varsity scene
clinch the SEC regular-season title with a 6-4 victory over Kentucky.
It doesn’t look much like a high school, located on the back row of an industrial park.
You have to wind past dumpsters, idling 18-wheelers and look hard for anything that differentiates it from the moving companies, appliance warehouses and furniture manufacturers.
At the end of the parking lot, a sign leans against a wall — “TNXL Baseball Academy.”
Welcome to Baseball High School.
“It’s the best education we can get,” Ryan Dease said.
It’s a late morning in May, and normally the UCF commit would have been sitting in a biology or history class at Lyman High. But a combination of technology, ambition and entrepreneurship is turning normal on its head.
Instead of going to Lyman or Dr. Phillips or Edgewater, some of Central Florida’s top baseball players take all their courses online through Florida Virtual School.
That allows them to show up at TNXL and work for hours on their favorite subject. It also means some of the area’s best talent is no longer available for brick-and-mortar schools.
Instead of competing in the state playoffs right now, those players are sweating, lifting and swinging away in a big one-room schoolhouse in Altamonte Springs.
“Baseball is a skill sport,” said TNXL owner Brian Martinez. “If you’re not working on your craft a lot, it’s not benefiting you if you want to play at the next level.”
The next level is where TNXL gets its name. The academy strips away any pretense that sports are merely extracurricular activities, even on the high-school level.
They are a means to an end, be it a college scholarship or a professional contract. That also makes TNXL a means to a beginning.
“A lot of kids go to college and they’re not ready,” said pitcher Jack Leftwich, who’s signed with Florida. “I want to be ready my freshman year and step right in.”
Martinez came up with the idea three years ago. He had been a coach with the Orlando Scorpions, an elite travel team.
The Scorpions were basically an offseason program for high schoolers. They’d play all summer and return to the usual academic routine in the fall.
One day while waiting for players to show up for after-school training, a light bulb went off in Martinez’s head.
“Man, it’d be really neat if we could get the kids earlier,” he thought.
That would have been impossible before the internet. Now students can take all their courses online, meaning they can tailor their class schedule around work or other commitments.
For TNXL students, baseball is basically a full-time job.
Leftwich has been at it for two years. He played for Winter Park High and the Scorpions, and then Martinez came up with the TNXL concept.
Enrollment costs vary, but they’re more than $500 a month per student. That’s cheap compared to many private schools, but those schools aren’t solely devoted to manufacturing baseball players.
“My parents were a little skeptical at first, but they realized baseball is what I want to do,” Leftwich said. “They committed to helping me if I committed to helping myself.”
He was committed enough to graduate from Virtual School last fall, six months before he would have at Winter Park. TNXL students knock out their daily academic work by mid-morning and head to the warehouse. If they don’t keep up their school work, they can’t participate in TNXL activities.
“It’s good discipline,” said Dease, a 6-foot-4 pitcher. “It teaches you the next level at college, where you’re not going to have somebody there to baby you.”
Players get hours of pitching, hitting and training guidance every day. What they don’t get is a chance to display those skills in the traditional high-school setting.
Athletes who utilize Virtual School or are home-schooled usually play for neighborhood schools (see: Tim Tebow and Nease High). TNXL has its own team, the TNXL Academy Ducks, which plays outside the Florida High School Athletic Association.
As an independent, it plays fall and spring schedules against junior colleges, Division 2 colleges and high schools. The Ducks went 28-4 in their inaugural 2016 season and finished 30-2 this year.
Their version of the playoffs was last month’s Perfect Game championship in Emerson, Ga., against 24 other baseball academies. The Ducks went 6-0 and outscored opponents 60-3.
How would they fare against top prep teams?
Martinez smiles at the thought, but he can’t really say. The Ducks have had trouble scheduling local schools, many of which have had potential stars siphoned away.
The rise of TNXL is a touchy subject. Four of the area’s more successful high school coaches declined to comment for this article. Martinez said his baseball enterprise has cost him some friendships.
“It was controversial. Some guys were very upset with us,” Martinez said. “But I’m not here to please high school coaches. I’m here to get these guys prepared.”
The numbers say it’s working. Eighteen TNXL students have signed Division I scholarships the past two years.
Colleges would have pursued most of those players regardless of where they played. But Leftwich said his fastball wouldn’t be as fearsome if he had kept going the traditional route.
“I’m leaps and bounds ahead of other players,” he said.
Such testimonials apparently carry weight. TNXL began with 14 students in 2016 and had 27 this year. Martinez thinks he’ll be able to field a varsity and junior varsity team next year.
“At the beginning we kind of had to go after kids,” he said. “Parents wanted to see if it would be successful.”
The rub for traditional schools is that there are only so many kids out there with 94-mile-per-hour fastballs. The more they matriculate to TNXL, the harder it will be for neighborhood schools to win titles.
Martinez played for Dr. Phillips and said he doesn’t want to cause such collateral damage. It is just an unavoidable byproduct of a growing business.
“I’m just trying to be cutting edge,” he said.
The basis of the TNXL business model is that, unlike traditional schools, nobody is forced to enroll. Students know what the cutting edge entails and are eager to participate.
That is how they can complete a full day of academics by midmorning and head to a warehouse to engage in a not-so-extracurricular activity.
“We have it all here,” Dease said. “We come in and everyone is smiling and having a good time. It’s the best atmosphere you can have.”
TNXL Academy does lack a few things traditional high schools can offer. There are no yearbooks to pass around this time of year or class rings to wear. Nobody is asking a classmate to the prom, if there were one.
And there will be no formal graduation ceremony. What students will leave with is an advanced degree in baseball.
That’s more than enough to make them true to their school.
“I have no regrets,” Leftwich said. “In the long run this is the best thing for my career. It was the best choice of my life.”