At the Shark Tank–like Vassar Pitch Competition, a Marketplace for Used Soccer Gear Scores Big
More than 20 million Americans play soccer, but there’s no reliable and trustworthy way for them to buy or sell their used equipment. Filling that need propelled the idea for FutMarket, a resale marketplace company conceived by two Vassar students and a third partner that would connect soccer-playing buyers and sellers across the country.
Is FutMarket’s business plan viable? Judges at Vassar’s third annual Shark Tank–like New Ventures Pitch Competition certainly thought so. They awarded the top prize—a check for $4,500—to FutMarket founders Cailan Baker ’26, Mauricio Meija ’27, and Meija’s brother Gianluca, following Shark Tank–style pitches by five contest finalists on April 30 in the Villard Room. “FutMarket earned the grand prize on the strength of both their presentation and their execution plan,” said one of the five judges, Associate Professor and Chair of Computer Science Jason Waterman. “They spotted a genuine market opportunity in the World Cup coming to North America this summer, and they came in with a road map for getting from concept to launch.”
Another judge, Ellen Rudnick ’72, Senior Advisor on Entrepreneurship and Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has generously funded the prizes for the pitch competition since the first one in 2023 as one of its early supporters. “It has been incredibly rewarding,” Rudnick said, “to see this germ of an idea come to fruition.”
Baker, an economics and political science double major from San Antonio, TX, said he and his partners were convinced that the FIFA Men’s World Cup tournament, to be hosted this summer by the United States, Mexico, and Canada, would generate even more interest in soccer, so marketing their product now was especially timely. “We think demand for this platform will be growing,” Baker said during his pitch to the five judges.
Baker and the Meija brothers have played soccer for most of their lives, so they are familiar with the types of equipment their company would handle for buyers and sellers. Baker and Meija, a midfielder on the Vassar men’s soccer team, first decided to start the company while chatting in their Townhouse dorm, and the three cofounders began working on the project in December 2025.
Meija, an economics major from Miami, FL, first began thinking about ways to find affordable soccer equipment when he and his brother were searching about a year earlier for some Nike cleats they wanted to buy. “We talked about the multiple online marketplaces we were searching on and how it was so hard to find something at a fair price and make sure it was authentic,” he said. “Right then and there, it clicked for us, and we saw the gap in the market.”
Meija said the FutMarket team would use the $4,500 prize for AI model training “to take our platform and our base to the next level.”
Baker credited his Vassar education with providing many of the skills required to make FutMarket successful. “My liberal arts education has played a big role in problem solving—knowing how to ask the right questions—and also how to be a good communicator,” he said.
Cher Mei ’26 won the $2,000 second-place prize for Cherish, a business that would use recycled textiles to make clothing, handbags, and other products. Mei said she expected to begin production of her products in New York City by the end of the summer.
The Emotional Empowerment Project (EEP), conceived by Cooper Jaffe ’29, was awarded the third-place prize of $1,000. Jaffe said the EEP would establish a network of mental health support volunteers across dozens of countries to enable international, mono-cultural college students to achieve a cross-cultural perspective and eliminate cultural barriers to managing their mental health, empowering them to seek vital, culturally conscious mental health care and support. “Different cultures normalize different coping strategies and stigmatize others,” he said. “With the belief that this stigma could be broken, I made the EEP to guide research-backed, culturally conscious engagement in mental health management strategies stigmatized by our beneficiaries. By eliminating cultural barriers, the EEP empowers our beneficiaries to receive vital mental health support.”
The over 100 attendees at the pitch competition also got a chance to show their support for the entrepreneurs via two non-cash prize categories. FutMarket won the Most Invested Award, for receiving the most faux coins attendees invested for the product they wished to back financially, and another contestant, Brandon Ogesi ’29, won the Fan Favorite Award, for receiving the majority of attendee votes for Accorr, his idea for an app that would use AI to connect college students and recent grads with job opportunities. “Accorr is an AI-powered outreach engine built for students that turns job networking into a guided, step-by-step path from first message to powerful referrals,” he said.
Ogesi described the competition as a defining moment in his development as a young founder. “I felt better about my articulation of the idea and more confident while pitching,” he said. “I was also excited for my friends and the people who have mentored me closely to see the idea I had been progressively developing for a while and watch me present it. My Vassar education has taught me to pause and think critically about a problem facing me, while giving me the tools to act on it.”
Julián Aguilar ’23, Academic Computing Consultant for the Vassar Innovation and Entrepreneurship (VIE) Program Director, was impressed with how much work all the contestants had put into their projects to prepare for the competition. “By the time they stood in front of our judge panel, it showed,” Aguilar said. “The quality across the board in this particular cohort was genuinely the strongest we’ve seen since the program launched three years ago. The success and maturity of this year’s cohort truly illustrate just how much entrepreneurship is a part of the fabric of the liberal arts, and how programs like ours help our students translate what they do here and apply it to problems that genuinely matter.”
Jean Tagliamonte, Assistant Vice President for Planning and Engagement, said she hoped more students would become involved in the VIE. “I’d like to remind students at any interest level that the VIE program is more than an annual pitch competition,” she said. “This program is here to allow Vassar students to explore the entrepreneurial mindset and to help them transform thoughtful questions into actionable solutions through experiential learning, purposeful collaboration, and dynamic engagement.”
Interested students may join the VIE by visiting go.vassar.edu/vie/join.