While the athleticism of dance is gaining traction in the sports world, too often it’s seen as somehow separate, somehow other.

Perhaps its role as a well-established art form hurts its credibility. Maybe it’s not so much “other” as it is “one or the other.” At 7 p.m. on March 11 at the Paramount Theatre, Zenon Dance Company wants to change minds.

Zenon, in a partnership with the University of Minnesota, commissioned the university’s 2014 McKnight International Artist Osnel Delgado of the Malpaso Dance Company in Havana, Cuba. Delgado set out to create a piece for a company that has been described as both versatile and venturesome, encompassing modern, postmodern, and jazz styles of dance. The result, titled “Coming Home,” is about baseball.

Yep, baseball.

In a 2014 Star Tribune article, Caroline Palmer describes the dance as “break[ing] down the mechanics of baseball — pitching motion, batting stance, hand signals — to the point where the movement source remains clear yet assumes entirely different dimensions.”

“Even as the dancers size up targets from behind imaginary gloves, wind up their arms and gaze after an imaginary home run, we witness just how universal these actions can be when considered in a different context,” Palmer writes. “Baseball is, after all, a metaphor for life in its constant striving for the win.”

And it sounds perfect for the company for which it was written. In 2012, Linda Shapiro of Dance Magazine credited the company’s founder and artistic director Linda Z. Andrews’ “catholic taste and feisty persistence” for having kept the Minneapolis-based group not only alive and well, but also in Minneapolis, for 30 years. Andrews’ motivation? “I wanted to bring a New York level of dance here and keep it here.”

Andrews’ daring, along with the troupe’s “buoyant athleticism and adventurous spirit,” must be working; four years later, the company is still going, going, strong. (Sorry, I couldn’t let that opportunity pass me by.)

Tickets are $15 in advance and $20 the day of the show, with students receiving free admission. Save your seat at austinareaarts.org, at the Austin ArtWorks Center, or by calling the box office at 507-434-0934.