Texas Sports Academy, GT School and Alpha School's other brands, with tuition

Texas Sports Academy is Alpha School's sports brand: a group of Texas private schools and one online program where students do their academics on Alpha's software in the morning and train in a sport all afternoon. Tuition is $50,000 a year at the original Lake Travis campus and $10,400 for the online program, which the school says the Texas voucher covers in full.

Its home page promises to "Double Your D1 Odds". Mine are zero, so the school could keep that promise to me for free, but I am too old for twelfth grade and have not enrolled. I have not visited this school or any other in this post. Everything here comes from each school's own website as I read it on October 4, 2026, and from named reporters. I build Understand, a tutor for adults, and I have no connection to Alpha or its schools.

One morning, many afternoons

2 Hour Learning is Alpha's model and Timeback is its software, as I described in my Alpha School review. The brands below all buy the same morning. A child works through adaptive lessons on a laptop for about two hours while adults called guides keep them going. Each brand then sells a different afternoon.

Alpha's site menu has an entry called "Specialty Schools" with six names: GT School, Montessorium, NextGen Academy, Nova Academy, Texas Sports Academy and Waypoint Academy. The schools page of 2hourlearning.com adds Alpha Anywhere, Unbound Academy and The Novatio School.

Texas Sports Academy's FAQ says it "is a branch of the Alpha School, and they share the same leadership". GT School calls itself "the gifted academy of the Alpha School family".

Lexi Churchill of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported on September 2, 2026 that Alpha had "more than 30 virtual and in-person campuses" in Texas, most of them accepted into the state's new voucher program, and that athletes could attend one of 13 sports academies. Alpha's own locations page lists 47 Alpha campuses, 13 of them on a 2026-27 waitlist, and none of the specialty schools under their own names. Alpha Lake Travis appears there at 4402 Hudson Bend Road, which is also the address on Texas Sports Academy's tuition sheet.

Alpha School's locations page on October 4, 2026, with the Specialty Schools menu at the top right.

The brands side by side

Every figure is the one the brand published on October 4, 2026. NextGen's comes from a sheet labelled 2025-26. "Not published" means I read the home, admissions and program pages and found no number.

Texas Sports Academy

The first campus opened on Hudson Bend Road near Lake Travis. Grace Dickens of Community Impact reported it "now open" on November 7, 2024, for kindergarten through eighth grade, and quoted MacKenzie Price as "co-founder of Alpha Schools and the Lake Travis Sports Academy".

The home page gives the day as a morning launch from 8:30 to 9:00, "AI-Powered Academics" from 9:00 to 12:00, and sports training and life skills from 12:00 to 4:00. The two hours of academics get three hours of clock. The FAQ describes "two focused hours of personalized, mastery-based academics using Alpha's Timeback system" and says students must show proficiency, "usually ≥90% mastery", in each module before moving on.

The daily schedule on Texas Sports Academy's home page, October 2026.

The Lake Travis campus site runs under the heading "No Teachers, Just Game Changers". Its coaches guide students "not only in athletics but also in academics". The same page argues for "a broad foundation in physical education" over "early specialization in one sport", which is a more careful position than I expected from a school with a D1 slogan. It also carries a "100% Money Back Guarantee" with two terms: the child will learn twice as much as in a standard school, and will improve on FitnessGram's cardio and strength tests by at least 20%.

The campus tuition sheet says: "Tuition at Texas Sports Academy is $50,000". There is a $100 application fee, a $1,000 deposit credited to tuition, and 5% off for a second child. The FAQ says tuition covers all activities, including the afternoon training.

The network's locations page listed nine academies when I read it, all marked "Enrolling". Besides Lake Travis and the online program there are baseball academies in Houston and Plano, basketball academies for boys and for girls in Carrollton, girls' flag football and girls' volleyball in Frisco, and an athletic training academy in Carrollton. Their grades run from 4 to 12 depending on the academy. The page for the boys' basketball academy, Dynamic Prep, says it is led by Jermaine O'Neal, an 18-year NBA veteran. I found no tuition on any single-sport academy's page. The application leads to a financial aid form that says: "Over 80% of Texas Sports Academy students receive financial aid or scholarships."

Texas Sports Academy Online serves grades 3 to 12 anywhere in Texas. The pricing page says a full year "is $10,400" and is "fully covered by the Texas $10k voucher". Students do academics at home in the morning and, per the FAQ, "have in-person group training in the afternoons" with local trainers. Its head of school is Chris Locke.

The pricing page of Texas Sports Academy Online, October 2026.

On results, the mission page says growth on the NWEA MAP test "has run at roughly twice the rate of a traditional classroom" and gives no numbers. The home page does not say how the D1 odds were computed. The FAQ says coaches are chosen partly for "their ability to meaningfully increase a student's chances of competing at the Division I level". I found no published data for either claim.

GT School and GT Anywhere

GT School is for gifted children from kindergarten to eighth grade, on Westinghouse Road in Georgetown, Texas. The Williamson County Sun reported on July 30, 2024 that it would open that August, that applicants would be assessed to see whether they fall "in the 90th percentile", and that tuition was "about $20,000". The school's site shows no tuition today. Its admissions page mentions a "limited number of $10,000 scholarships" and enrollment for 2026-27.

GT's morning is longer than Alpha's and the site says so. The academics page describes "two 50-minute blocks and one 25-minute block" between 9 and noon, and the home page says: "Three hours of focused, high-cognitive-load learning beats seven hours of passive seat time." Afternoons go to olympiads, debate, robotics and philosophy. The site names Arvind Nagarajan and David Chen as its leaders. Their letter on the about page says: "Our first nine students proved the model."

The published results are percentiles without a dataset: students who "outperform 91% of students nationally", test averages "from the 94th percentile in Reading to the 98th in Math and Science", and a promise of "1400+ SAT and AP 5s by 8th grade". A school that screens for the 90th percentile, as the Sun reported in 2024, will post high percentiles before it teaches anything. I made the same point about selection in the review. The anonymous parent whose long account I relied on there had children at GT School, and the reviewer's 5x growth figure rested on five children.

GT Anywhere is the virtual version, launched in 2026 for grades K-8 nationwide. Its FAQ asks for two hours of daily work plus a weekly cohort session and an advisor call, with optional weekend intensives in Georgetown four times a year. Tuition is $10,400.

The tuition section of GT Anywhere's home page, October 2026.

NextGen Academy

NextGen Academy is a middle school in North Austin built around video games. Chloe Young of Community Impact reported on February 24, 2025 that it had opened the previous August "to four fifth- through eighth-grade students", and that for four hours a day students play games such as Minecraft, Fortnite and Overwatch in an esports arena while being assessed on teamwork and public speaking. Her article states the condition plainly: "To access these gaming experiences, students must complete two hours of academic coursework each day". Nobody made me that offer in seventh grade.

The site now says grades 3 to 8. It describes a "Badge & XP System" that unlocks privileges, and it makes a guarantee: "top 10% placement nationwide within two years". The tuition sheet linked from the menu is for 2025-26 and says $25,000, with the same $100 fee, $1,000 deposit and 5% sibling discount as the other campuses.

Alpha Anywhere

Alpha Anywhere is the at-home product, and its FAQ is exact about what that means: "Alpha Anywhere is a program, not a school." It issues no diplomas or credits, and families pair it with their state's homeschool registration. It takes children from age 8, in 25-minute sessions adding up to about two hours. Joe Marone is its chief executive.

The site shows no price. It says: "New enrollments are temporarily paused while we continue to raise the bar with current families." Alpha's own FAQ says the pause runs "through the end of 2026" and sends families to GT Anywhere.

Alpha Anywhere claims "2.3X" faster learning. The parent review I cited in my Alpha post reported that an earlier home pilot of the software, without guides or rewards, produced about 1x. Neither figure comes with data.

Nova Academy, Montessorium and Waypoint Academy

Nova Academy is the low-price campus brand: grades K-6 on Ed Bluestein Boulevard in Austin, at $15,000. Its site describes "a resourceful and cost-effective model" in which students mentor each other and work with local organizations. The brochure linked from its home page is titled Valenta Academy and advertises an open day in Bastrop in October 2024. Brooke Sjoberg of Community Impact reported on July 7, 2025 that Valenta, a proposed charter school on the two-hour model, would not open in Bastrop after the Texas Education Agency vetoed its application.

Montessorium is one mixed-age classroom of 26 students, K-6, inside a Guidepost Montessori campus in Cedar Park. It keeps Montessori materials and trained Montessori teachers and adds laptops, which each student uses "for 2 hours per day". The site's description of the software is the most candid I found on any brand's page: "a suite of great learning apps wrapped in an AI proctor". It is also the only brand site I read that names books the children read together, among them Hatchet and The Trumpet of the Swan. Its headline numbers seem to come from other schools. The home page shows "6.5×" above the label "Average academic growth rate compared to traditional schools", a figure 2hourlearning.com attaches to the top 20% of students at Alpha's flagship, and the footnote under the program page's score table says the data comes from "established 2 Hour Learning schools". Montessorium says it accepts Texas voucher funding. I found no tuition.

Waypoint Academy is the outdoor brand, at a venue called Hog Heaven in Dripping Springs. Its schedule has academics from 9:00 to noon and workshops in archery, survival skills and rucking until 3:15. The daily schedule page says students "must earn their adventure-based afternoons by completing rigorous academic work". The home page still says the school is "launching", the tour page mentions 2025-26, and I found neither grades nor tuition, so I cannot tell how far along it is.

Unbound Academy

Unbound Academy is the one public school in the family: a tuition-free virtual charter for Arizona residents in grades 4 to 8. Its site says all eligible applicants are accepted, that school runs from 8 to 2 with core academics from 8:30 to 11:00, and that certified teachers "are on screen the whole time". It refers families outside Arizona to The Novatio School, a private virtual school for grades 2 to 8.

That admissions policy makes Unbound the nearest thing to a test of the model on students nobody selected. I went through it in the review and repeat only what I verified there. The charter application projected 60% of students proficient in math and 65% in English after a year, as quoted by Dan Meyer. The school's own board slide of June 2026, marked "NOT OFFICIAL", showed 10% and 28%, against Arizona averages of 34% and 42%. The figures were preliminary, and Meyer notes the students may have started lower than the application assumed. The same deck reported MAP growth of 1.8x. The website now says 2.8x, and adds: "Arizona state assessment results will be published as they become available."

The school day on Unbound Academy's home page, October 2026.

Two hours, then the thing you love

Read as a group, these sites describe one bargain. NextGen and Waypoint state it outright: finish the academic work and the afternoon is yours for the thing you came for. Dylan Kane's conclusion about Alpha, which I quoted in the review, was "Motivation is doing most of the work", and the specialty brands look like an attempt to buy motivation with something a particular child already wants. I think that is a reasonable design. Whether it produces the growth these pages claim is unknown, because no brand here has published data that anyone outside can check.

An adult can copy the bargain more easily than the software. Put the two hardest hours first, while nothing else has a claim on you. Anders Ericsson's review of practice studies, which I cite in Alpha School for adults, found "reduced benefits from practice exceeding 2 hr". Then spend the afternoon on something that uses what you studied, the way a GT student takes the morning's math to a robotics table. The adult's difficulty is that nobody withholds the afternoon. You can go climbing without having done the calculus, and most days you will. That post lists the substitutes I know of for a guide, with prices.

Understand

Understand is a voice tutor for adults: you can interrupt it, it reads a text aloud word for word and stops when you ask a question, and it asks you to explain an idea back and keeps a record of what you explained that you can read and correct. It has no courses, no problem sets, no spaced repetition and no Android app, and no trial has evaluated it. It is free for now, and it is the wrong choice for a child or for anyone who wants a school.