Critics said The Bennett School — a junior high and high school baseball academy that offers two hours a day of AI classroom instruction — wouldn’t succeed in its first year of operation. Last month, the boys of Bennett proved them wrong.
Eighteen students graduated in May, and all are college-bound, with some earning baseball scholarships to Texas A&M, the University of Texas, Rice and Oklahoma State, among others. And about a week before graduation, the Bennett Rebels won the National Academies Association conference championship.
Brandi Dowell, a commodities trader who founded the school in August 2025 with Texas A&M University professor Gregg Bennett, said the championship win was “a fairytale ending to a really incredible year.”
“I knew we had a really talented group of kids, but the fact that they were able to face the best of the best and balance their schedules through a rigorous long season and come out on top, that’s impressive,” she said. “I was so excited, especially for our seniors, that they were able to end the season with a trophy. They started something brand new and they won a trophy. It’s pretty remarkable.”
Dowell is the mother of four sons. The eldest just finished his sophomore year at the University of Texas. Judson Dowell, a recent graduate of The Bennett School, is committed to playing baseball at Rice University in the fall. The younger two are enrolled at Bennett and also hope to play college ball.
Dowell said she “couldn’t take it anymore” with Houston’s public schools, noting that she thinks the traditional educational model is inefficient and wastes a lot of the kids’ time.
“The kids are held hostage in the classroom for seven or eight hours a day, which doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. So she reached out to Gregg Bennett, who previously coached her kids in the 12 Select Baseball Academy, and they began working with Austin-based Alpha Schools and the Texas Sports Academy to launch their private campus at Baseball USA on Sam Houston Parkway.
Dowell acknowledges that the two-hour AI learning model isn’t for everyone but points out that gymnasts and ballerinas train in a similar way with limited classroom time, as do those studying fine arts at The Juilliard School. Thirteen other Texas Sports Academy facilities offer similar learning models, including basketball schools in Houston and Richmond and a baseball academy in Pearland.
After the Rebels won the championship game 8-7 over North Carolina-based Pro5 Academy on May 13, the students held a well-deserved celebratory dogpile in the outfield, and Dowell said some of the kids shed a few tears as they stood on the field reflecting on what they’d accomplished during their first year as a team.
“It was our seniors’ last game, and that’s always emotional,” she said. “Everyone spent a long time on the field soaking up the moment. We’d been going at a fast and furious pace and there had been some challenges along the way that ultimately added to the grit of the team. When you’re faced with a lot of people who are trying to keep you off the field, you value getting to play the game. It was like they were in a foxhole together. They gambled on something big for their senior year and it really paid off for them.”
They’d already lost four times to Pro5 earlier in the season when they faced the team during a double-elimination round in the playoffs.
“They’re a very talented team with lots of Division 1 commits,” Dowell said of Pro5, which recruits athletes from across the country. “The coaches were so great and welcomed us to the league. They were just really tough to beat. The final game was back and forth. We would score one; they would score one. We had gone up by one run in the bottom of the sixth inning but then gave up three runs in the top of the seventh.”
High school baseball only has seven innings, so going into the bottom of the seventh, it looked like it was over, but the Rebels rallied and got some more runs. With a runner on third and the score tied up, junior outfielder Jackie Bryant, who’d spent more than two months on the bench with a broken wrist earlier in the season, stepped up to the plate and hit a fastball to the outfield for a walk-off RBI that secured the championship.
“I was up there to win. I wasn’t going to lose,” Bryant said. “I touched first base and then everyone kinda stormed the field. We all just started running out to right field and started a dogpile. I was at the very bottom of that pile. I got a turf burn on my face. It was worth it. It was a good memory.”
Bryant, 17, who is committed to play at Texas State after he graduates high school, transferred to Bennett from Jordan High School in Katy and said he believes it was “100 percent the right choice.”
“Going to Bennett was the best decision I’ve made for my baseball career,” he said. “Throughout the season, we had a lot of eyes on us. The friendships I made and getting to work out every single day for about six months going into the season definitely had me prepared.”
Even though Bryant spent a lot of the season healing from an injury, he learned how to be patient and that he can’t spend a lot of time worrying about things he can’t control, he said. He worked out his lower body when he couldn’t lift weights and he observed his fellow players and studied the game.
The stands were frequently filled with professional scouts, and what the players accomplished “translates to the next level because it was done against next-level competition,” said Gregg Bennett, who serves as the Rebels’ general manager in addition to being a co-founder of the school.
“Our players’ numbers speak for themselves, but the context matters even more,” he said. “There’s a major difference between producing against a typical high school varsity schedule and producing against elite national competition. Our players faced arguably the toughest schedule in the country, saw high-level pitching almost every game, and still led the nation with 62 home runs as a team.”
Dowell said the students proved in The Bennett School’s inaugural year that high-level athletics and elite academics can coexist.
“We weren’t looking to go undefeated,” Dowell said. “We weren’t focused on winning a championship. It was about exposing these kids to the best competition that we could find in the country and allowing them to compete at a super high level all year to prepare them to go into college next year and compete for spots on the field.”
The Rebels’ premier team played 44 games this season against competitors that are considered the best competition in the nation. Most high school varsity baseball teams play about 28 games in a season before the playoffs, and they’re not traveling out of state.
Coach Russel Reeder, who heads up the baseball program, said he was thrilled to lead the kids to a victory in their first season of playing together. He led high school baseball teams for 16 years and was semi-retired from coaching but came on board to coach his son Karson, who recently graduated from Bennett and is committed to the baseball program at UT in Austin.
“Besides having quality kids and quality players, we did things the right way as a program,” Reeder said. “We weren’t traveling the country to beat our chests and try to be the No. 1 team in the country. We just want to play the best programs. We handle ourselves very professionally. We’re a fun team to play. There’s no drama. We play hard and respect the game and respect our opponents and prepare for the next level.”
Back in February, as the baseball season was just getting started, Reeder encouraged the players not to listen to the noise from the Texas teams that didn’t want to play Bennett. Baseball academies in Florida, California, Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi were willing to play the Rebels but some others canceled, questioning the educational model and perhaps fearing that the Bennett team would have an unfair advantage because of its extensive practice and training regimen.
“We knew when we started this program that nobody was going to appreciate it,” Reeder said in a ep talk to the players at the beginning of the season. “It bucks the system. It’s a little different. You chose to be here because this is what you love to do and what you want to do. You have everything at your fingertips to be great at it. If they don’t want to play us, that’s fine.”
The coach added that his goal is to prepare students for college ball and baseball careers, noting that the students in the inaugural class at The Bennett School couldn’t have been a better group of young men.
“Besides just loving baseball, they were the right kids to start a program,” he said. “The work ethic was tremendous. They’ve learned to invest in themselves. Every time you build a team, you hope there’s a good relationship between the kids. They are all really good human beings. We had the right kids to start this program. We built a culture.”
The students at Bennett use Measures of Academic Progress testing, operated by the not-for-profit Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) used by many Texas public schools. Dowell said that recent test results showed that some students at Bennett tested up to 11 times higher than the national average for their grade level.
Alpha schools like Bennett are accredited by Cognia, a nonprofit, voluntary certification program that validates charter and private schools’ commitment to quality education and improvement, according to its website.
Tuition at The Bennett School is $15,000. When the campus opened last fall, all students were offered $10,000 vouchers, funded in part by Dowell and other donors. Under the state’s new voucher program, eligible students can apply for $10,000 toward their tuition each year going forward, and at least eight families have already been approved, Dowell said.
Word about The Bennett School has traveled fast. Twenty-seven students were enrolled at the beginning of the 2025-26 school year, and the number climbed to 56 as new youth transferred in. Next year they expect to have 80 to 100 students. “We’re trying to balance rosters,” Dowell said. “You can only have so many outfielders and so many catchers to make sure everyone is getting their reps and their playing time.”
Next year, The Bennett School will have three varsity level teams called varsity, prospect and premier, along with a team for about 25 to 30 middle schoolers.
Bryant said he’s looking forward to taking on a leadership role in his senior year.
“We have a very talented young group,” he said. “Our seniors laid the foundation for us. We were blessed to see what good leadership looks like. Now we’ve just got to continue it.”
