For much of America, sports rule people’s lives and pack their calendars. Whether it’s football, baseball, golf, horseback riding, freestyle skiing, or parkour, sports as an overarching category are this thing that fills a huge amount of our collective mental space. It makes sense, then, that you may be thinking about writing a college essay that intersects with the world of sports. And it’s not a bad impulse. Sports are a potent essay topic, and there’s so much you can draw on to lead to a stellar essay.
If you’re thinking about writing an essay about sports, send us an email. We help students unlock their best work to craft exceptional applications.
The assumption a lot of people make is that if you’re writing an essay about sports, you must be an athlete. It’s a fair assumption, and most of the students we work with who end up writing about sports are athletes…but not necessarily the type you may assume, as we’ll get into later. Writing an essay from the perspective of an athlete is an opportunity to show character, commitment, and teamwork in a setting that requires immense resilience. This is ideal fodder for a college essay.
But this isn’t the only scenario. You can also write about sports without ever playing a sport well, or at all. Writing about sports from the perspective of a fan offers narratives ripe with emotion, excitement, and community. The experience of being a sports fan, especially if you root for a particular team, is an emotional rollercoaster. We love this!
Either way, fan or athlete, there are so many stories to tell.
But what if you’re planning to compete in college?
If you are planning to play a sport in college, it may not be a great idea to write your college essay about that sport. If you’ve been recruited, or you have had your application flagged by a coach, the admissions officials know that you play this sport and that you are fairly exceptional at it. Writing about it doesn’t offer any new information about you. They want to see something new from you outside of the sport you’re intending to play. While it is possible to give them that new information from within the frame of your sport, it would be better to completely separate your essay from your athletics.
If you aren’t going to play a sport in college
If your athletic career isn’t going to continue into college (in a formal way, at least), you need to be careful about how you write about sports. For example, if you lean too far into the idea of yourself as a “star athlete” or the leader on the team, the application readers may wonder why you aren’t playing in college and may even question the authenticity of your essay.
To avoid this, your skill at the sport if you are writing as an athlete is really secondary to the bigger story. You can be a mediocre athlete who has been mildly successful, and still write an outstanding essay that is centered on sports. By taking your success as an athlete in that sport out of the story and focusing instead on challenges and relationships, you make the sport a secondary aspect of the story that supports the narrative without dominating it.
Because this isn’t, at its core, about sports: it’s about something bigger than sports. It’s about you.
Athlete or Fan, the angle is the same
Whether you are writing as an athlete or a fan, you need to tell a story. Sports lends itself really well to this, which is awesome and makes your life easier. These are the core rules:
Focus on Yourself: This essay is about you, not sports, so you need to keep yourself at the center of it.
Pick a Story: The key to a great essay is having a beginning, middle, and end. This may sound obvious, but most college essays actually don’t have this structure — and that’s a problem. As you are brainstorming, you need to pick a story that is constrained in time and the smaller the better.
Lots of Detail: The secret to a powerful college essay is detail. This is why a smaller story is better. The smaller the story, the more room there is to put detail in.
Writing about sports can be a powerful way to convey key details about your personality and character to colleges. Just remember to keep the story simple, focus in close, and consider not writing about the sport you’re a star in if you’re planning to play in college.
Navigating the college process is harder than running one of those ninja obstacle course races with flaming javelins. Send us an email if you want a more centered way of doing things.