A picture of the founder, Brayden White
Every week, my class opened up the same: not with a definition, but a decision.
I’m Brayden White, a high school student at The Frisch School, and the founder of BOW Sports Capital, a free economics program I built and run for middle schoolers.
Each session, I’d send a link, and students would load up a simulation I created, handing them the keys to a front office. In one of them, each student ran a team payroll and had to decide whether keeping their star was worth crossing into the luxury tax. Nobody told them what “luxury tax” meant; they learned it the way real general managers do: by paying it.
That’s the whole idea behind BOW Sports Capital. The name comes from my initials, but the project comes from a simple observation. I loved sports. I knew kids who loved sports. And I knew almost none of them loved economics, even though the two are basically the same subject. A salary cap is a budget constraint. A trade deadline is supply and demand. A rookie contract is a bet on future value. The economics was hiding inside the box scores the whole time.
So, I built a class around it. This past year I ran two six-week Zoom sessions for about 30 middle school students. Each class mixed three things: short slide lessons, open discussions, and the part the kids cared about most, the simulations. I built them with Claude Code, and the simulations became the engine that let students understand the business. There’s a luxury tax game where you manage a roster under real cap pressure. There’s an NFL draft game where you weigh risk against upside with every pick. There are trade negotiations, ticket pricing decisions, and roster-building challenges. Hiding inside each one is a concept teachers have spent decades trying to get kids to care about: incentives, opportunity cost, scarcity, market value, risk.
Kids kept showing up week after week, kept asking for more, and parents told me their kids were recommending the class to friends.
Because BOW Sports Capital is free and runs entirely on Zoom, students can join from anywhere. You don’t need to be good at math. You don’t even need to be a huge sports fan. You just need to be curious about why things cost what they cost and why people make the decisions they make. That’s all economics is; Sports just happens to be the best disguise it’s ever worn.
Registration for the next session opens soon. You can register at this link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScWtoBaZ6jtJxRCWKWqSHOzd-nKTFeOIk-NQRcw9oXYmmewig/viewform?usp=header
If you’re a student who’s ever zoned out in class, or a parent of one, I built this for you.
Learn more at braydenokley13.wixstudio.com/bowsportscapital or reach me at braydenokley13@gmail.com.
Brayden White is a high school student in Westchester, NY, and the founder of BOW Sports Capital.
Brayden running a simulation for students to understand revenue shar
