Guidance from the College Counselor

College GAMEplan encourages you to work closely with your high school college guidance counselor and athletic director, as well as your high school and club/select coach(es).  There are more than 3,000 accredited four year colleges and universities and each has their own admission standards for both sports and academics.  Communicate and work with your high school's College Guidance Counselor to generate a list of the schools that meet your academic capabilities within the region(s) you are interested in.  If you have specific interests an a particular major, let your Counselor know.  This will narrow the amount of research you will need to do to find schools that might be a good fit.  Once you have established your initial target list, use College GAMEplan to begin making contact with each school.

As an additional valuable resource to help you through your college recruiting and selection process, College GAMEplan provides you with several tools to keep track of, then rank, each college you contact or visit. 

To begin, simply complete or update your My Student Athlete Player Profile.  Then visit our Choosing A College tab and click on Virtual Tour.  This will automatically provide you a list of alphabetized schools you can quickly click through to research each school.  Double check to see that they meet your academic abilities and review their Athletic Pages to check out their sports programs.  Use our Recruiting Guidelines page to choose between NCAA Division I, IAA, II and III, or NAIA to again help narrow the list of colleges you might begin to consider. 

As you consider each college, analyze the team's results and their current roster.  Make sure you are comfortable with the program and gather the coaches contact information.  

Then follow the instructions described in each month’s College GAMEplan newsletter to stay on top of your own GAMEplan.  When it's time to plan a campus visit, use our Campus Visits link to help plan and prepare for your trip.  After talking to and visiting college coaches and other faculty and staff, use College GAMEplan’s  College Rating and Tracking Form, and Selecting a College comparison spreadsheets to weight each of several important categories and considerations.  Then create and review our completely impartial statistical summary to find the school that best matches your requirements.  And use College GAMEplan’s Financial Aid links to determine your financial aid options. 

Choosing the right college for your child’s specific needs can be a difficult, time consuming, and challenging responsibility.  Along with the terrific resources your College Guidance Counselor has, College GAMEplan provides you with all the tools to simplify and organize the process, while making sure that your final decision takes into account every major consideration important to you and your family.

One final important note - College GAMEplan does not reduce the need for you to work with your high school's College Guidance Counselor.  As a free Internet resource, we cannot possibly get to know your unique personality, your academic history, your future career desires, or your learning styles.  Aside from knowing you personally, College Guidance Counselors also have an abundance of tools that can help you learn about yourself and they can help steer you down a path to the colleges best suited for you - especially from an academic perspective.  Use this important resource to help narrow your choices, then use College GAMEplan to help evaluate each school from an athletic perspective and to make sure you stay on course to maximize your recruiting opportunities.