GuardNILState of the App

What we are launching with

The five NIL Prep pillars.

NIL means name, image, and likeness. It is the rule that lets athletes get paid for who they are. Our five pillars are the habits we think a young athlete needs long before any of that matters.

What this part does

The pillars are the list of things your child works on. You pick from them when you build the family agreement. Progress against them is what the app tracks, and finishing them is what lets a payment go through.

The idea came from our founder. Money follows the habit, not the other way around. A kid who serves their community, keeps their word, understands what a dollar does, keeps their grades up, and works at their sport is ready for an NIL deal. A kid who only has the deal is not.

The five pillars

  • Pillar
    Community
    What it means
    Giving time to people outside your own house.
    What a parent picks
    At least one way to serve, and how often.
  • Pillar
    Character
    What it means
    Being the same person when nobody is watching.
    What a parent picks
    The traits to work on, like honesty or showing up on time.
  • Pillar
    Financial Literacy
    What it means
    Understanding money before you have any.
    What a parent picks
    At least one way to learn, and how often.
  • Pillar
    Academics
    What it means
    School first.
    What a parent picks
    A grade goal you choose yourself, like keeping a B average. You set it and you track it.
  • Pillar
    Performance
    What it means
    The work in the sport itself.
    What a parent picks
    At least two things, like practices attended or a skill to drill.

Two older pillar names you will find in our code

If you search our code you will find seven pillar names, not five. Savings and Social are still there so that older saved agreements keep loading.

Savings became the place the money goes rather than something to earn, and Social was folded into Character. A new agreement only ever uses the five above. We mention it because a reviewer reading the source will hit the number seven and should know why.

What the percentages mean, and what they do not

Each pillar has a suggested share of the monthly amount. Character is 30 percent. Financial Literacy, Academics, and Performance are 20 percent each. Community is 10 percent.

These are labels, not payment slices

This is a place our older material was wrong, so read this carefully.

Finishing one pillar does not release that pillar's share of the money. The percentages are there to show a family how the effort is weighted. They do not split the payment.

The real rule is simpler and stricter: every enabled part of the agreement must be finished before the whole payment can be approved. If four out of five are done, nothing pays. It is all or nothing.

The same rule applies to the automatic payment schedule. When a payment period comes up and something is unfinished, the job skips the period and records the reason as incentives_incomplete. It does not pay a partial amount and it does not quietly pay the whole amount.

Who is allowed to say a pillar is done

A parent cannot simply tick a box themselves. This is deliberate: the person who benefits from the answer should not be the person recording it.

It is enforced in the database, not in the page. The rules that allow a completion record to be written are written for coach and staff accounts. A parent account has read access to those records and no write access, so a request to mark something done goes nowhere even if it is sent straight to our server with the screen bypassed entirely.

What that leaves for a launching family

Our staff can apply a completion and reverse one. They cannot reverse anything for a period whose payment has already been approved or paid, because payment records cannot be edited once written. Every action is written to a permanent record with who did it.

An open design decision, and we would rather say so

A family we launch with has one adult account and no coach account. That means the day-to-day route for recording progress is not settled yet.

We are not going to describe a mechanism here that a launching family will not have. This is an open design decision rather than a bug, it is on our compliance page, and a reviewer should ask us about it directly.

What data this part touches

  • What
    Which pillar options you picked
    Notes
    Part of the family agreement. Chosen from lists, not typed freely.
  • What
    A completion record
    Notes
    One row saying this part, for this period, is done. The database refuses a duplicate for the same part and period, so the same thing cannot be counted twice.
  • What
    A permanent record of every mark and reversal
    Notes
    Who did it and when. Cannot be edited or erased by anyone.

Nothing here was typed by your child, because your child never types anything.

What a parent sees

  • Each pillar as its own card, with what is done and what is left.
  • A clear reason when a payment cannot be approved yet, naming what is unfinished.
  • The suggested share next to each pillar, which is a weighting and not a slice of the payment.

If something goes wrong

Something is marked done that was not

Progress can be reversed. It cannot be reversed for a period that has already been paid, because payment records are permanent. Every reversal is recorded with who did it.

The same thing is submitted twice

The database refuses the duplicate. It does not create a second completion and it does not double a payment.

Nothing gets marked at all

The payment simply does not go through, and the schedule records why it skipped. Money stays where it is. Nothing is lost, and nothing pays out by accident.

You disagree with a record

Contact us. A correction is a staff action, and like every staff action it is written to the permanent record rather than made quietly.