Why We Invested: Athlete To Athlete
Mentorship Platform for Youth Athletes
Athlete To Athlete pairs youth athletes with current college athletes for one-on-one virtual mentorship that builds confidence, resilience and habits that carry well past sports. Since launching in 2023, the company has worked with more than 35,000 athletes and grown more than 100% each year. This year alone, it’s on track to facilitate more than 100,000 mentorship sessions.
The company recently raised an $8 million Series A led by Rally Ventures, with participation from Newbound VC, Up Honest Capital and Scrum Ventures. It’s the latest addition to Rally’s sports tech portfolio, and our first investment in youth athlete development. Below, Co-Founder & CEO Anthony Waller talks about going from UCLA Football walk-on to founder, why NIL made the business possible and the 98% of college athletes he built it for.
1. What is Athlete To Athlete, and what gap does it fill for young athletes?
Athlete To Athlete is a mentorship platform that connects kids with current college athletes, with the objective of building driven, confident and resilient young people. This is far more about the personal development of these kids than just how they perform on game day. It’s about the qualities they learn through sports, role models and coaches. When they do finish their sport, whether that’s at age 12 or after seven Super Bowl rings, we want to make sure they’re prepared for the rest of their lives.
Our mentors are current college athletes, so they were in these kids’ shoes not that long ago. Most of them had a strong role model or coach along the way, whether that was when they were younger or trying to get recruited. These college athletes really believe in giving back and uplifting the next generation. They understand that great athletes are built through coaching, mentorship and the people who invest in them along the way. It’s all virtual, with 12- or 24-week programs built around the school year and the athletic season.
2. You played football at UCLA right as the rules changed around paying college athletes. How did that experience lead to Athlete To Athlete?
I was an athlete first and foremost. It was probably the defining part of my identity until I started this company. I played just about every sport growing up, but football, wrestling and baseball were the big ones. Eventually, I went on to play football at UCLA. So I had experienced sports from both perspectives, first as a youth athlete and then as a college athlete.
I was on the team in 2021 when the NCAA changed its rules on NIL (which stands for name, image and likeness). Before that, college athletes couldn’t be compensated for using their personal brand, whether through endorsements, social media posts or paid appearances. Overnight, that changed. The question became: how could I provide value to young athletes in this new world of NIL?
My co-founder, Zach Maisus, had a very similar experience. He was an All-American wrestler in high school, and sports was something we both ate, slept and breathed, and we still do. We met in the weight room at UCLA as lifting partners. We respected each other’s athletic mindset, which was just pure hard work and determination, and it turns out we see the world, people and entrepreneurship the same way.
Athlete To Athlete was really a matter of several things coming together at the right time. There was a lot of momentum building in both college and youth sports, and we were well positioned to take advantage of it because we were right in the thick of it. It’s also a very personal mission for me. I’ve experienced just about every side of this world, except the parent’s perspective, which I hope to experience someday.
3. How do you find and recruit mentors, and how do you approach safety for kids and parents?
Recruitment started very homegrown. It was me knocking on doors and texting everyone I knew at UCLA Athletics, and our first 200 or 300 athletes were people I either knew well or had interacted with. Even today, all of our athletes come to us via referral. It’s all ambassador-driven and peer-to-peer, which creates a very like-minded group of people who self-select into this.
Mentorship has always been a relatively easy sell. College athletes get to give back based on their own experience, with all the resources they need to succeed, and they can do it from their dorm room or their training facility.
On safety, we’re very particular because parents are trusting us to work with and develop their children. Our application, onboarding and verification process has multiple steps. It starts with practical screening and motivation-based questions, and it ends with applicants meeting someone from our team. Even with current college athletes, we need to make sure we’re providing the right kinds of role models.
4. NIL usually makes headlines for multimillion-dollar brand deals. Where does Athlete To Athlete fit in?
Those headline deals look a lot like professional sports: brand deals, social media and marketing products. But the stat we’ve been watching is that 98% of college athletes don’t do any NIL deals at all. I think a lot of people don’t realize that.
That 98% is our target market. It’s the guy who plays lacrosse at a smaller D1 school who’s dead set on being a neuroscientist. We give athletes like him a platform to give back to the community that’s supported them, and we turn that into steady, paid work.
I would have been part of the 98%. I was a walk-on at UCLA, and I was definitely not doing a shoe deal with Nike. I had no brand power and no social media, but I had a lot of tangible, valuable experience to give back, and that’s exactly where Athlete To Athlete comes in.
5. What are your top priorities now that the round has closed?
We have two priorities. The first is expanding our partnerships across youth sports, with the technology companies, club teams and governing bodies that support young athletes, and with the universities that support our college athletes. Those relationships help us reach both sides of our market: the families and the mentors.
We look for partners who share our philosophy about why youth sports exist in the first place. For us, it’s about the people kids become, the qualities they develop and the experiences they have along the way. Of course, kids are going to compete and work toward the next level, but we believe there’s so much more to youth sports than that.
The second priority is safety as we scale. Now that we have the funding, we want to make sure the platform remains a very safe place for kids, college athletes and parents as we grow from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of athletes. We’re continuing to add protections for the young athletes on our platform, and we’ll have more to share on that soon.
Rally Operating Partner Luke Zaientz knows this market firsthand. As founder, COO and CEO of Reigning Champs, he built NCSA, a recruiting platform that connects high school athletes with college coaches, from inception to more than $200 million in annual revenue. Reigning Champs was sold to Endeavor/IMG Academy and later to EQT for $1.2 billion.
Luke led the investment and shared his thoughts on what makes Athlete To Athlete a fit for Rally:
We’ve been building out our sports tech portfolio at Rally, and a lot of our investments come down to two things. First, the company has to fit our venture criteria. Second, we need specific personal experience that helps us judge the business and lend a hand in its growth. Between my background, Rally Managing Director Justin Kaufenberg’s background and other portfolio companies that can support it, Athlete To Athlete is such a bullseye for us.
We look at businesses in PowerPoint form until we meet the team, and then it’s a whole different thing. Anthony and Zach are special people. Anthony sent us monthly performance updates for about a year and a half before we invested, and they were completely transparent: here are the results, this went right, this went wrong. And every month, the results got better. When I first met him, I told Justin I hoped this would be the first of many investments with him.
I’m an OODA loop person: observe, orient, decide, act. It’s a decision-making framework that comes out of the military. Anthony and Zach may not even know what an OODA loop is, but they’re incredibly good at running it. What’s going on in our business? What does it mean? What are we going to do about it? Then they go do it and start again. Every time I see Anthony, he’s excited about something they just changed in their processes.
I certainly think Athlete to Athlete can be a nine-figure business. No matter how great you are at sales, there’s nothing greater than an amazing product. Parents love their kids, and when kids blossom with an amazing mentor, that creates great word of mouth and a virtuous feedback loop. We know this market intimately from NCSA, and the opportunity here is even bigger. NCSA is useful for a couple of years in high school. Mentorship is useful from middle school until retirement. Nothing’s ever a layup, and growing a business always takes hard work, but we’re all big believers at Rally in what Anthony and Zach are building.
