As a Senior Private Counselor and former Ivy League athlete, I work closely with student-athletes aiming to leverage their athletic talent in the college admissions process, often in pursuit of what feels like the “Holy Grail”: competing at a Division I program within a highly selective academic institution.
But the reality is far more complex.
With academic and athletic success both demanding intense focus and dedication, high school becomes a zero-sum game of finite time: every hour spent training or traveling to a tournament is an hour not spent on academic preparation or other extracurricular pursuits. The path to recruitment is not only physically exhausting—early morning training, late-night studying, and weekends consumed by homework and competition— but it is emotionally taxing.
For years, many students exist in a gray zone, uncertain whether a roster spot will ultimately materialize. That uncertainty makes it difficult to know how to invest their time wisely, and what tradeoffs are truly worth it.
Living in the “Maybe”
“I think I’m good enough to compete in college, but will I actually be recruited?” is a question I hear often. For most, the honest answer is “maybe.” Given the uncertainty, here are some tips I give my student athletes to prepare for any path that lies ahead.
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Build Your Academic Foundation First
No matter how talented an athlete you are, coaches will only support you in admissions if they believe you can succeed academically at their school. At Ivy-level schools, coaches will often ask to see a copy of your transcript before they engage in any serious communication with you; they want to know whether you are in the game academically before spending time and resources on you. They’ll be looking for high grades—mostly A’s—and strong rigor, including honors and AP courses. If you can prepare for and take an SAT or ACT sophomore spring, a strong score will signal to coaches that you are in fact a serious student-athlete. Taking care of your academic foundation is the best and most important way to prepare yourself for the pathway to selective colleges with or without athletic recruitment.
Know Where You Stand Early
It can be tough to know how you stack up nationally—especially in team sports without objective metrics like times and rankings—but your local context provides helpful signals. Are you fighting for playing time on varsity? Cut from the top club team in your area? If you are not among the strongest athletes locally by your sophomore season, it becomes unlikely that you’ll be recruited by an elite academic school or powerhouse athletic program that draws from the top athletes in the nation and even the world. There are some exceptions, like in skiing where athletes reach their recruiting potential later, sometimes even during a postgraduate year. But in most cases, I encourage student athletes to be honest about what their trajectory suggests, recognizing when long hours spent traveling to club tournaments or working with private coaches are unlikely to yield their desired results. Seeing this writing on the wall sooner rather than later and becoming more intentional with their time allows them to invest in other academic and extracurricular endeavors that could open additional doors if their sport proves unable to do so. The tough part to swallow, for most dedicated athletes, is that their sport will not confer any advantage in competitive applicant pools unless they are recruited— so it’s crucial to have other activities on their extracurricular resume.
When It Makes Sense to Go All In
If an athlete’s performance is trending in a promising direction—let’s say they’ve made a state all-star team or a top junior tour in golf—I encourage them to make decisions that will give them the best possible chance to reach their athletic potential. That might mean building an academic schedule that is rigorous but manageable during the season, or using summers strategically to balance training, competition, and academic enrichment by taking an online asynchronous college course rather than attending a residential academic program away from home (and from their training facility and competitive events). The key is intentionality: if your performance gives you reason to believe recruitment could pan out for you, make sure your academic planning and summer choices support that goal rather than compete with it. Even if you don’t ultimately end up on a college roster, you’ll know you gave yourself the strongest possible opportunity while keeping other doors open.
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Make Your Efforts Work Twice as Hard
Look for ways to leverage built-in opportunities. If your junior-year history and English courses both assign research papers, choose topics that connect to a shared theme. If your school gives you an option to do an independent study, take it and build on that same theme further using your resources and time at school. Supplement these projects with a self-paced online college course on the same topic that you can work on over the summer while training and competing. Over time, you’ve built a clear academic narrative that you highlight in both college applications and conversations with coaches. Pursue one leadership role beyond your sport and stick with it all four years of high school. Being able to tell a coach not only that you have strong grades, but that you’ve done in-depth research on civil rights in literature and history and lead the school’s Honor Committee, for example, helps distinguish you in the recruiting pool while giving the coach a compelling case to present you to the admissions team. On the other hand, it also leaves you with a strong profile if recruitment doesn’t pan out.
Treat Time Like Your Most Valuable Asset
Just as in-school assignments can help you build an academic focus, it’s important to approach your schedule with the same intentionality. Look for ways to make use of the pockets of time created by athletics: a two-hour car ride to a tournament can become a perfect uninterrupted block of SAT prep, and a Saturday afternoon game still leaves time for a full morning for homework if you get up and start your day as you would on a school day. When you approach your time with a mindset of optimizing your efficiency, you’ll feel energized by all that you can accomplish, including enough sleep! This kind of discipline ensures you’ll be well positioned no matter how the recruiting process ultimately unfolds.
How to Read Coach Signals–and Respond
I encourage my athletes to get on coaches’ radars early by introducing themselves via email and sharing periodic updates about academic and athletic developments. For many, this will remain a one-way conversation until Division I NCAA communication periods open after the athlete’s sophomore year (though DIII coaches can respond any time). A response like, “Thanks for coming to our camp; we’ll be in touch if it seems like a fit” sends a very different message than “You’re one of our top prospects. Let’s schedule a call to discuss next steps.” Likewise, an athlete whose club coach is fielding calls from college programs after their freshman season is in a very different position than one who is still waiting for email replies late into junior year. Being in denial of lukewarm—or worse, nonexistent—interest can cost a student-athlete valuable time. If you’re not feeling the love, it’s time to pivot from those pipe dreams and invest quickly into academic and other higher impact extracurriculars.
Keep Your Expectations Grounded
It’s difficult to pursue two pathways with equal intensity and expect to end up at the same destination regardless of which one ultimately materializes. If you want to give yourself the best possible shot at recruitment, you’ll need to accept that your extracurricular resume will look different from those of classmates who are free to devote all of their time to academic or leadership pursuits. Could an Ivy-level school still be possible if recruitment doesn’t pan out? Maybe. But the students who navigate this process with a healthy perspective understand that their sport comes with tradeoffs—the key is to approach those tradeoffs thoughtfully. Build a strong academic foundation, pay attention to the signals your sport is sending you, and use your time strategically so that doors remain open no matter how the process unfolds.
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Anita holds a BA in Philosophy from Princeton, where she is an alumni class officer and former interviewer, and an MA in English from Middlebury. At Princeton she also contributed her drive and competitiveness to the women’s lacrosse team, winning an NCAA Division I National Championship and three Ivy League Championships while earning national scholar-athlete academic distinction and the Connie McAllister athletic department award for “effort, selfless dedication, enthusiasm and heart.” She brings these qualities to her relationships with students as she helps to bring out the best in them.
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