They Didn't Enter the Contest. They Built It.

It is a nonprofit run by high school students, for high school students, in Zionsville, Indiana.

Evan Walker and Charlie March-Gibson, both students at Zionsville Community High School, founded it. The format is deliberately brutal. Teams of four show up. They are handed a prompt. They get 60 minutes. Then they stand in front of a panel of judges and pitch a business, with real investment money on the line.

Competitions run monthly during the school year and usually draw 10 to 15 teams. They are open to any area high schooler, not just Zionsville students. The money comes from local businesses the students solicit themselves. Last year the group awarded $10,000.

The most recent event ran on August 15, 2026, at an event center called Zionsville Underground. One winning idea was an energy audit business aimed at helping hotels, office buildings, and hospitals cut thousands off their electric bills. A teenager came up with that in under an hour.

Because it removes the thing that stops most people from ever starting.

Give a kid a month to develop a business idea and they will spend three weeks deciding whether the idea is good enough. Give them an hour and there is no time for that. You pick something, you build the argument, you go.

The constraint also strips away the parts of entrepreneurship that are not entrepreneurship. No logo. No website. No name debate. Sixty minutes forces the team down to the questions that matter: who has this problem, what would fix it, and why would anyone pay.

And it teaches something that shows up in every adult version of this. Ideas are cheap. The ability to explain one clearly, under time pressure, to people who are deciding whether to give you money, is not.

Walker and March-Gibson could have entered other people's competitions. Instead they made one, and that decision taught a different curriculum entirely.

Entering teaches you to pitch. Building teaches you to sell, which is harder. Somebody had to walk into local businesses and ask them to fund prize money for a student-run event with no track record. That is a cold pitch with a real no on the other end of it.

Building also teaches operations. Venue. Date. Judges. Registration. Prompt design. Getting 10 to 15 teams to show up on a Saturday. None of that is glamorous and all of it is the actual job.

And it teaches the thing almost no school program covers: what happens when you are the one responsible for whether the event happens at all. There is no teacher backstop. If nobody handles the room, there is no room.

If your child keeps saying they want to start something but nothing ever launches, this is the pattern to point at. They did not wait for a good idea. They found something missing in their own town and built it.

Here is the detail that separates this from a resume project.

Avi Yadav competed in a few Sprint to Success events, then joined the organization. He is set to take it over as Walker graduates.

Most student ventures die at graduation. The founder leaves, the momentum leaves with them, and the thing that looked like an organization turns out to have been one person's enthusiasm. Planning a succession before you leave is a rare thing for a seventeen-year-old to do.

It is also the difference between a project and an institution. A project ends when its founder is done. An institution outlives them.

Worth asking your kid directly if they run anything, a club, a team, a small business: who does this after you? Watching them realize they have no answer is more instructive than any lecture about legacy.

Yes, and you do not need a venue or sponsors.

Run the same format at your kitchen table. Set a timer for 60 minutes. Give a prompt, something real and local: a problem at their school, something annoying about your neighborhood, a service nobody nearby offers. Four people is ideal but two works.

At the end, they present for five minutes to whoever is around. Grandparents count. Neighbors count. The audience just has to be people they are slightly nervous in front of.

Ask three questions after every pitch. Who exactly has this problem? What would they pay? Why hasn't someone already done it?

Run it monthly. The improvement between the first pitch and the fourth is the reason to do it. First time out, most kids describe a product. By the fourth, they are describing a customer, which is the shift that matters.

If a team wants to take an idea further, mapping out the customer, the costs, and the first few steps on paper is the natural next move. A notebook is fine. So is a shared doc, or a structured planning tool like Foundra that walks a first-time founder through each section.

Plenty of places, and most parents have never heard of any of them.

The Young Entrepreneur Institute runs a Young Entrepreneur Pitch Challenge open to students in grades K through 12 nationally, including a summer and out-of-school-time contest that announced 2026 winners on August 31.

NFTE runs national competitions for students who have been through its entrepreneurship coursework.

The Blue Ocean Student Entrepreneur Competition is open to high schoolers worldwide and is run entirely online, which removes the travel problem.

A number of universities run high school pitch events, including Seton Hall's Pirates Pitch and St. John's high school competition. These tend to be regional and free.

And the Rice Business Plan Competition, while a graduate-level event, is worth watching with an older teen simply to see what a serious pitch looks like.

The useful move is not picking the most prestigious one. It is picking the one happening soonest, so the gap between deciding and doing stays short.

Then this is the most valuable thing on the list, and you should lower the stakes rather than skip it.

Start with an audience of one. Then three. Then a room. The fear does not go away because someone told them it would be fine. It goes away through repetition in situations where the cost of a bad pitch is zero.

The 60-minute format helps here too, oddly. When there is no time to over-prepare, there is no time to build up dread. You had an hour. Everyone knows you had an hour. Nobody expects polish.

Also, be careful about what you praise. "That was great" teaches nothing. "I understood exactly who your customer was, and I did not understand how you would find them" gives them something to fix. Specific feedback is a gift and vague encouragement is not.

Two high school students founded Sprint to Success, a nonprofit that gives student teams 60 minutes to invent and pitch a business. It has awarded $10,000, runs monthly, and draws 10 to 15 teams per event.

The time limit is a feature. It kills perfectionism and forces teams to the questions that actually matter.

Building the competition taught them more than entering one would have: selling to sponsors, running operations, and owning whether the thing happens at all.

The succession plan is the most impressive part. Most student ventures end at graduation, and this one has a named successor.

You can run the same 60-minute format at home tonight, for free, and the fourth attempt will be visibly better than the first.

What age is right for a pitch competition?

Some programs start as young as kindergarten, though the format changes a lot. Around ages eleven to thirteen, most kids can handle a real prompt, a time limit, and questions from adults they do not know.

Do they need a finished business to compete?

No. Most student competitions judge the idea, the reasoning, and the presentation. Sprint to Success gives teams the prompt on the spot, so there is nothing to prepare in advance.

Is the prize money the point?

It helps, and it is not the point. The value is standing in front of judges and being asked questions you did not anticipate. That skill transfers to job interviews, college admissions, and every negotiation they will ever have.

How do I find competitions near us?

Start with local high schools and universities, which often run free regional events. Then check national programs like NFTE, the Young Entrepreneur Institute, and Blue Ocean, which runs online.

Should I help my kid prepare?

Help them practice, not write. If the pitch sounds like a parent wrote it, judges notice immediately, and the kid loses the confidence that comes from having done it themselves.

What if there is nothing like this in our town?

That is exactly what Walker and March-Gibson found, and it is why Sprint to Success exists. A gap in your area is an opportunity, not a dead end.

1. Cashing in: Public speaking, creative ideas highlight high school pitch competition (Current, Aug 23, 2026)
2. Zionsville Community High School students found entrepreneur pitch competition (Current, May 18, 2026)
3. Young Entrepreneur Pitch Challenge, national summer and out-of-school-time contest
4. NFTE national competitions for student entrepreneurs
5. Blue Ocean Student Entrepreneur Competition
6. Pirates Pitch Competition for High School Students, Seton Hall University