Who's behind this
Two high school students from Northern Virginia who got tired of watching friends sign stuff they didn't understand.
Aditya Thaker
Co-founder
Stone Bridge High School. Interested in the gap between what athletes earn and what they know about earning.
Shray Vij
Co-founder
Focused on getting the financial basics to athletes before they need to learn from expensive mistakes.
We started Rookie Numbers because we noticed something that didn't sit right: athletes our age were signing real deals with real money, and nobody had sat them down for even a 20-minute conversation about taxes. Or contracts. Or what "exclusive" actually means when you sign it.
The existing resources are mostly aimed at college athletes who already have agents or compliance teams helping them out. That doesn't do much for a junior in high school who just got a DM from a local gym chain offering $300 for an Instagram post.
So we're trying to be that conversation. Not as financial advisors, just as students who spent time learning this stuff and figured we should pass it along before more people learn the hard way.
Why we think this matters
The NIL market is over a billion dollars. Twenty-nine states let high schoolers participate. And the number of programs teaching them financial literacy around it is basically zero.
We're not trying to build a company out of this. We just think it's messed up that a 16-year-old can sign a contract with tax implications and nobody in their life has explained what that means.