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Webinar

Athletics in U.S. College Admissions

Join Collegewise experts for a candid look at how selective colleges evaluate athletic involvement and what it means for your student’s application.

  Wednesday, April 22

 4:00 PM PT / 7:00 PM ET 

   Zoom

What Are Selective Colleges Really Looking For in Student-Athletes?

Many parents ask: My child has trained for years in a sport and has won numerous awards. How much does that help with college applications? Can it truly open the door to top-tier schools?

The assumption is that strong athletic performance alone will meaningfully improve a student’s chances of admission, especially if they have awards, rankings, or years of training, but the reality is more complex.

Selective colleges are not simply looking for the best athletes. Instead, they are evaluating how a student’s athletic experience reflects their development, impact, and potential contribution within the broader applicant pool. In other words, it is not just about what a student has achieved in their sport, but how that experience is understood in the context of their overall application.

At Collegewise, we help families understand how admissions officers evaluate athletic involvement and guide students in positioning that experience so it strengthens their overall application.

During this event, you will learn:

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How selective colleges evaluate student-athletes beyond recruitment status



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The difference between recruited athletes and strong athletic applicants

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How athletics fit into holistic admissions review

Register now

Fill out the form below and secure your spot in our event.

Meet The Speakers

Emily Stevenson
Emily Stevenson
Former Admissions Officer

Emily has spent nearly 20 years of her professional life in college admissions, both as an admissions officer and a college counselor. She’s logged stints evaluating applications at UC San Diego, the University of San Diego, and Rutgers University, as well as worked as a college counselor at the district level for Poway Unified School District and as co-director of college counseling at La Jolla Country Day School. This experience on both sides of the desk—and both sides of the country—has helped her successfully guide students to a wide variety of schools ranging from the most highly selective colleges like Yale, Brown, Penn, Columbia, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, the University of Chicago, Wellesley, and Carnegie Mellon, to larger public universities like the University of Washington and both the UC and Cal State systems, to Catholic schools such as Villanova and the University of San Francisco.

Andrew Disney
Andrew Disney
Former Admissions Counselor, USC Marshall School of Business, Pepperdine University

Andrew Disney has over a decade of experience in higher education, supporting students across admissions, athletics, and academic advising. Before joining Collegewise, he served as an NCAA Compliance Officer at three Division I universities, where he helped recruited student-athletes navigate NCAA eligibility requirements alongside the college admissions process. He later joined the admissions team at the USC Marshall School of Business before moving into an academic staff role at Pepperdine University’s Graduate School of Education and Psychology. Andrew holds degrees from the University of South Carolina and West Virginia University and completed UCLA’s College Counseling Certificate Program.



About Collegewise

 

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