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.”