Free Online Program Teaches Students Economics Through Sports Business

By Brayden White

Every week, my class opened up the same: not with a definition, but a decision. I’d send a link, and students would load up a simulation I built, 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 free program I founded and ran for middle school students across the area, including families in Rockland County. 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. 

Now, I’m hoping to bring that same opportunity to more students and families in Rockland County. Because the program is completely free and runs entirely on Zoom, Rockland students can join from home, whether they are in New City, Monsey, Suffern, Nyack, Pearl River, Clarkstown, or anywhere else in the county. 

Because BOW Sports Capital is free and runs entirely on Zoom, students can join from anywhere. That matters because enrichment programs are not always easy to access. Some cost money, some require transportation, and some are only available in certain  schools or towns. BOW Sports Capital is meant to remove those barriers and give students a fun way into economics without needing any prior experience. 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. Rockland County students and families who are interested can register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScWtoBaZ6jtJxRCWKWqSHOzd-nKTF eOIk-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.