The 2-Hour School Day & Building an AI-Powered Sports Academy w/ Malekai Mischke (Part 1) - Ep. 49

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Today we're joined by Malachi Mishkey, the co-founder of the Texas Sports Academy. The Texas Sports Academy is a network of academic schools that pairs AI-powered schoolwork with pro sports training. They have 12 campuses and more than 1,500 students in 6th through 12th grade, where kids learn twice the national norm in two hours a day, then they train for their sport. Before the school, he did Gauntlet AI, he built a LinkedIn for basketball with the NBA, and contracted with longevity entrepreneur Brian Johnson. Malachi is a former college basketball captain and an elite marathon runner. Malachi, thank you for being here, man.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Jerome, thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

So how did you where did this come about? Um the inspiration for uh the Texas Sports Academy.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

I'd have to zoom out a couple years actually. So in 2024, I was living in San Francisco um in the fall and looking to build my own indie hacker-like startup. I landed on trying to use AI to track macros really efficiently through voice. And it was a really fun project. I got to learn a bunch about how to build my own product, solve my own issues, um, scratch my own itch is the term I was looking for. And uh that was a fun experience. And a friend, shout out Max Grev, he told me to apply for Gauntlet AI. And Gauntlet, for those who don't know, is an intensive AI program where the challengers, that's the name of the participants, they spend about 100 hours a week mastering AI. And our first cohort was 12 weeks straight of 100 hours a week in AI. The bus would pick you up from the apartment at 8 a.m. and leave the office at midnight. So very intensive. And you get really good with AI, you get really tight with your uh fellow challengers. And that was a transformative experience for me because now this person that had all these different ideas but didn't quite have the technical expertise with AI now had all that and could build these different ideas. And so after this program, we were um looking to figure out what the next job is. So how Gauntlet works is the graduates are matched with hiring companies. One of the hiring companies was the founder or the uh main principal of Alpha School, which is this uh cutting edge new uh private school model that's changing the world. And uh in shore, we were pitched on the idea of joining this education incubator to build out education startups. It began with a Shopify for micro schools like product, and that quickly shifted into basically building up the Texas Sports Academy brand. And it's been pretty perfect because I have this AI background, I played sports, um, and I'm really passionate about having an impact. And so Texas Sports Academy has been able to combine all that for me.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

That's awesome. And so so you're in this incubator, and then um and where did the where did the idea come from to uh with the pairing of the like the athletic side uh with this kind of new revolutionary type of uh you know schooling model?

SPEAKER_00 3:33

Um yeah, I think about it a little bit more like a venture studio where the idea wasn't directly like me and our fellow co-founders thought it through. It was given to us where it's like, okay, there's a new way to create these schools where you can, in short, take advantage of so many different tailwinds happening in the US and in Texas right now. And so the different tailwinds are number one, there's a general movement away from public schools towards alternative types of education, whether it's homeschool, private schools, alternative sports schools like Texas Sports Academy. There's also this AI movement happening where now you don't need as many staff directly teaching in front of a classroom for students to learn, but rather with a fully personalized academic software program, you can learn twice as much in just two hours a day. There's also these Texas school choice vouchers where now families that were attending public school now have the funds to be able to afford attending these private schools. And finally, there's the NIL movement where sports families they care even more about their kids being great at sports because as soon as the kid turns 18, they can start earning pre-grade funds. And so with all this in thought, we're like, okay, the main opportunity here is with sports. How do we create sports schools? And the initial plan was to find coaches out there that have dreamed about creating their own sports school, that have their own facility, that have the uh connections with their own networks and work with them to be like, hey, we can now provide the support that you need, the academic program, to create your own school, and you can achieve that dream. And that's really what it became. And so our initial plan, the initial idea was not to build our own building, build our own facility. It was to partner with coaches out there that already had this covered and work with them to be able to launch their schools. And so this was a year ago. Um, between June and August of 2025, spent every day on the road talking to all these coaches and helped them recruit students for their schools and launched five schools in August of last year. And that was um probably my biggest career win today. I mean, I'm super proud of what we've done since then, but that was very tricky going from zero to one just a couple of months, and yeah, that's how we really got it going just last year.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

That's incredible. And so these uh a couple of things I want to uh touch on that uh that you talked about. One being the uh how do you guys achieve with the students uh in just uh a compact of two hours uh each day the equivalent or more than what uh you know a traditional school structure would um produce uh in learning through throughout a whatever what is it, seven, eight hour school day, usually. Um like what's the because you're not just halving it, right? It's you're you're minimizing that uh substantially, the amount of time. And I'm I'm a big believer in um in uh you know the quality and the like that more time doesn't always equal bitter outcomes or outputs. But um I'm curious on how you you guys have managed to achieve that uh and like talk to me a little bit about like what that model looks like and what what happens during a two-hour you know school day.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Yeah, sure. I'll first begin with how the learning is that much more effective and then talk about what it actually looks like if you were to go into one of these classrooms. Okay. And so the background is if we look at education over the past hundred years, the way in which education has been delivered has pretty much been the same, where you have a teacher in front of a classroom where every single student they're learning the same material at the same time from that teacher. And that model has gotten us to where we are today, which is great. However, there is a whole field of learning science where we know that there's certain learning science concepts that lead to better learning. The most prominent is the uh Blooms 2 Sigma paper, which in short shows that personalized learning one-to-one with a tutor leads to significantly more effective learning outcomes. And if we're able to go back to me and you, that'd be great. Yeah. And so, well, we know that there's a couple aspects of learning science that lead to better learning outcomes, but those have not been implemented into traditional schooling. So these are things like spaced repetition, where if you learn something on day one, you get quiz that again on day two, then day four, then day eight, then day 16. There's things like cognitive load theory, where you want the difficulty of the subject to be at around 85% of your ability. So it's not too easy, not too hard. These are all things that we know lead to better academic outcomes, but have never been fully implemented into a traditional school system because, well, it's a teacher in front of a classroom, it's a one-size-fits-all model, and in that same classroom, let's say you're looking at a sixth grade math classroom, you'll have some students that have the knowledge of an eighth-grade ability, some that might be at the fourth grade level. They're all very different levels. Um, and so long story short, we take all of these learning science concepts, put it into this personalized academic model to lead to much more efficient, much more uh productive learning, which is why in just about two hours of focused work, students are able to learn twice as much as they would have in seven hours. And I can talk about how we measure that. Um, but that's just a gist of how that works.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Is the curriculum the same as the traditional school curriculum? Or are you guys incorporating um something else?

SPEAKER_00 9:13

It's covering the same concepts that students in traditional public schools, private schools in Texas would be learning. And so it's those core skills, those core. So we measure based off of the, it's called the NWA map test, which is a national norm reference test uh covering language, science, math, and reading. And our curriculum covers the same materials that students in public school are learning. We just deliver the learning in a very different way because we first and foremost provide fully personalized plans so that students are learning courses of the correct difficulty all the time. And then the other piece is we make sure that there's a whole motivational model to get students to be very excited to learn every day. And our students every single day in class like running in to want to open up their lab and start working, not exactly, but we do have little elements built into it. So talk about that motivational piece. We know that if we want to get great academic outcomes, it's about 10% courses of the correct difficulty, and then 90% all motivation. The analogy there is like all of the information out there is on YouTube, but not everybody is that driven to want to go learn it on their own. What we do in our schools is we find students that we have, for example, a volleyball school just down the road in Frisco. These students, they all want to go D1, they all want to be pro volleyball players, and we tell them look, we have volleyball training every day from 12:30 to 3:30 with these amazing coaches. If you want to go practice them, you have to finish your academic work first, no matter what. If you don't finish your academic work, well, you don't get to go practice that sport that you love. That's one piece. The other piece is we take the best concepts of video games and put that into the system. So, for example, if a student completes more of their academic work, they earn XP points, which they can use to redeem fun gifts. And so it's been pretty cool because it takes this uh kind of like competitive athlete energy that they have and it channels it into academics where now they can compete with each other on how much learning they did, they can get prizes and rewards for the more learning that's been done. And of course, if they get all their learning done, they get to go play that sport that they love.

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Gotcha. Okay, and so is uh is there where where does this uh where does the school end? Is it does it end when they are going into high school? Uh or uh like what does that transition look like into like the next step of their academic life?

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Uh yeah, so our schools are primarily sixth through twelfth grade. And so just like traditional private schools, it ends after senior year, um, many students in this model, they sometimes get so far ahead and they are able to finish all of their graduation requirements by the time they're in ninth or tenth grade. And we've had parents ask, like, should I have my kid go to college when they're already 15 years old? We tend to advise them no, just because the uh can be a weird social dynamic. Plus, we find that students should just take that extra time in high school to build their own passion projects or get even better at their sport, whatever it is that they're most passionate about. Um, so in short, the transition looks like we prepare them with all of these um like the core foundational knowledge they need. We get them really good at their sport, get them really good at their standardized tests, so that their odds of getting into the very best college possible are maximized by the time they're you know a senior.

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Gotcha. Okay, and so and then with the the schools individually, um, you touched on partnering with uh different coaches um with their existing facilities and um you know network in their uh in their sports realm. Who is it uh what's the business model? Is it where like similar is it kind of like uh um almost like a franchise model where like the the coach then owns their own school or like where where does where does that kind of separation lie and what's the role of the coach in the school?

SPEAKER_00 13:11

Yeah, so our schools now are full Texas Sports Academies. Um it's the business model that one would expect where the revenue coming in are from the parents paying to attend a school. And uh what we found to be quite valuable is we know that what parents and students value the most is well, number one, having an amazing coach that can get them to their athletic goals, two, having great academic programs, three, having the very best teammates. And we know that at the very bottom of that list is how nice the facility is. What you care more about are the outcomes for the students. Um, we still work with great facility partners because we work with partners that are vacant during the day and they're looking for, they'd love to be partnered with a facility to be able to run their programs in that space. Um that's what we've done for a number of our schools. Whether it's at a nice rec center or a beautiful training facility, we work with them that are empty during the day. It's idle space to be able to run our school programs there. They all have classroom space, they all have great learning environments, and then they have the like volleyball court or the flag football field right there for students to be able to enjoy as well.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

Awesome. Um in building all this and then getting this live, obviously you talked about uh the zero-to-one getting that first school launch being the biggest win so far. Um what what have been some of the the challenges uh to get you know to get to this point or to get to that first school launch that you had to go through uh and overcome?

SPEAKER_00 14:49

There was no playbook. I I was asking Chat GPT like, how do you start a school in just a couple of weeks? And that's not really something people do. Um, and so number one is just like, okay, hasn't really been done. There isn't a clear playbook. What do I do? And uh then the next spot is to figure out, okay, are there people I can talk to that have done something like this? And there were some. We were building kind of part of the alpha school network, and so we were able to talk to those that have been there when they're trying to launch a new school. But this was still a new concept of working with coaches, finding uh like vacant or like daytime vacancies in sports training facilities. Um it's all new. And so, I mean, a bunch of challenges like how do we collect applications from parents? What should that look like? Um, what is the like so many different details that we just had to figure out and build on the fly? But just a really hard working, talented team that made it our number one priority where we didn't really do anything else for that period and honestly since. And that's led to us being able to figure out and solve problems pretty quickly. So yeah.