David Lanster, soon to be a senior at Ransom Everglades School, is a man of many talents. He’s a talented baseball player, a top notch student and an excellent chef.
Lanster is so good in baseball that he was able to earn a position on the Ransom varsity team even before he started his high school career.
“They called me when I was in sixth grade,” Lanster says. “They needed help at second base.”
Later he moved to shortstop, and today he plays catcher for both Ransom and a summer travel team, Miami Pro Instruction.
“This will be my third summer with them,” he says.
The team plays in tournaments throughout Florida and even played in one in Georgia. This year Lanster is making showcase appearances around the country at his own expense with hope of securing a college baseball scholarship. “I’m dedicated to going to the best academic school that I can,” he says.
“I’m focusing on academics, then baseball.”
Harvard and Columbia top his list for both baseball and academics. He is also considering MIT and is considering a major in either biomedical engineering or biochemistry.
Last summer, whenever he wasn’t away at a tournament, Lanster interned at Biorep
Technologies, a biomedical engineering company that creates products for diabetes research and minimally invasive heart surgery. He spent the summer doing anything from answering calls to helping make silicon molds of heart valves used for testing the riveting of metal parts.
“I loved it and it was super interesting to talk to the engineers about what they do,” he says.
“They all enjoy their work.”
Last fall, Lanster volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club to help kids learn. Since the baseball team’s field is at the Boys and Girls Club, the players tutored the kids before practice.
“It was a lot of fun,” he says. “During the actual season we didn’t get to tutor them.”
When they went back in May for spring practice, the kids were happy to see them again.
“Until then I didn’t realize how important it was to the kids,” Lanster says.
Cooking is another of Lanster’s passions and he jokes that he started cooking because his parents stopped feeding him. But his mother says that even as a child he was interested in what she was doing in the kitchen. Eventually he began cooking his own scrambled eggs and graduated to making his own dinner. He is mostly a selftaught chef, but he did go to a culinary camp at the Biltmore Hotel and he is an avid viewer of the Food Network.
“I like to cook,” he says. “It’s relaxing in the execution, but I also love the planning of it.”
His interest in baking is very strong and he recently started a baking business with a friend, Kelly Moran. They plan to donate a percentage of the revenue to charity.
“We are currently ‘open’ for business,” he says. “At this point we are only taking special orders and catering events as we try to find a more substantial base. We sell cupcakes, cake pops and cakes, all a little more sophisticated than just vanilla or chocolate.”
Lanster says they are good at special orders. They have already delivered on orders for two dozen Frozen themed cake pops and four dozen Earth Day themed cupcakes.
— By Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
