In this article, we will cover how to write your college essay about sports. This topic can be strong, but it has to be done right. If you do not write your college essay about sports in a unique manner, it will be hard to stand out amongst the other perfectionist student athletes.

Remember: you’re writing your college essay with the goal of standing out amongst everyone. Sports is not exactly going to put you in the 99th percentile of unique quality. However, it’s still a strong topic. It shows you have the strength of grit and spirit to overcome trials.

With that said, here’s our advice on how to write your college essay about sports.

Table of Contents

1. Tie in Sports With the Essay Question.
2. Show Don’t Tell.
3. Use of Metaphors in Your College Essay.
4. Be Relatable; Not Everyone is an Athlete!
5. Talk Less About the Sport Itself, Focus More on You.

Tie in Sports With the Essay Question.

When writing about sports in your college essay, it’s quite easy to lose track of the essay question. This seems to be something that happens with a lot of our clients.

For instance, they’ll write about their experience being a Soccer player to answer a question about their greatest talent or skill.

Here’s an example:

“I was at the precipice of defeat. The opposing team was just slightly ahead of us, and there were only seconds to the end of the timer. For our school team, it was a defeat for sure. I could feel the disappointment from the parents sitting at the bleachers a mile away. I could envision my coach’s empty smile trying to cheer up our team with things like ‘you did your best’. It hurt. Then, I decided to do something crazy.

From the farthest side of the field, I made a gamble. I kicked the ball hard enough to trick myself into thinking my lower half flew with it.

I made the shot.

We won.”

How to Write Your College Essay About Sports –PenningPapers.com

So, maybe you have something like this serving as an opening. Now, you need to make the rest of it not about how you saved the soccer game. Instead, we’re going to use what we wrote to answer the main question: what is your greatest talent or skill?

Let’s say this experience demonstrates your skill in never giving up even when all hope is lost. If that’s the case, add that in! If you want to show that your greatest skill is your positivity even in the darkest times, then add that. It’s important to remember that you must show how you sport experience demonstrates that skill.

In other words, when writing your college essay about sports, show the admissions officers how your sports experience actually answers the question.

Show Don’t Tell.

This is quite a difficult one to get right, but trust us. You want to show don’t tell.

In order to write your college essay about sports well and better than others, you’ll need to make sure your language stands out. Many of our clients who bring us their rough –and even final– drafts lack the ability to ‘show don’t tell’.

In simple terms, you want to avoid writing too many statements. Instead. write more descriptive sentences that show the reader what experiences were like.

Still confused? Here’s another explanation. Don’t write facts. Facts are statements that hold nothing else to them other than, well, the facts. When writing feelings, readers can understand the whole spectrum of you as a person.

Okay, here’s an example. Let’s say someone wanted to portray what the feeling of dread is after having received a bad grade.

Bad: “I walked up to my teacher’s desk and reached out for my essay. I earned a C-. “How could this happen to me?” I thought. Confused and ashamed, I felt bad about myself.

It was at that point that I realized I had to change.”

Good: “I reached out a nervous hand and tried not to get the edges of the corner wet with sweat. “C-” It wasn’t to say I didn’t try, I just couldn’t articulate ideas into words properly. Though, Freshman me didn’t know this. All he knew was the whirlwind in his head: “Am I just dumb? Is it my teacher’s fault? Did I miscalculate the directions? Am I just destined for failure?” I did what any nervous wreck would, and shoved the paper into the darkest corner of my backpack (where the grade nor my teacher’s comments would never be seen again.)

It never truly disappeared, though. The dread of what the grade entailed, my failure in high school literature, echoed across my head.

Wanting to be free of the dread, I decided to confront my lack of writing abilities –one step at a time.”

Notice how the first description only talks about what had happened? We don’t really get to know enough about the applicant. We just know that they felt bad about their grade and they wanted to change.

However, in the second description, they dive right into the details. This is critical when writing your college essay about sports. The admissions officers don’t want to know just the facts, they want to know about you. If they can relate or feel from your position deeply, you will become a more real person than just the surface level.

Use of Metaphors in Your College Essay.

We don’t exactly mean you have to be poetic when writing your college essay about sports.

What we mean by using metaphors is that you should parallel the underlying connotations of sports with your character and personality.

Sports is such a strong topic in the college essay for exactly this. You have the opportunity to draw the connection that sports has to how you carry your life. It’s a metaphor!

Basketball can be thought of as a metaphor for the necessity of teamwork and leadership for victory to happen. As such, you would make a great addition to your school of choice for your proclivity for strong leadership and teamwork. You may even think yourself a good project manager because of basketball’s influence on your collaborative efforts, which justify your major in business.

Golf may be a metaphor for unwavering patience and intense mental calculation. The patience and calculation needed to make the right swings in golf may give you these skills you need for the future as an engineer working in a team situation.

Figure out what your sport requires you to do. What kind of skill does your sport exercise? When you’ve figured that out, draw the connection between that sport and your personality.

Be Relatable; Not Everyone is an Athlete!

One of the things you may forget when you want to write your college essay about sports is writing your essay to be relatable.

Not a lot of people are athletes. Think about the math. Out of the average class year, there are often only a few tens of people who are actually in a sports team. A smaller fraction of those people have a prominent position in the team such as team leader. An even smaller fraction of those people have won awards or noticeable mentions.

Sure, it’s good to stand out from the rest. However, if it is difficult for the admissions officers to relate to you, they cannot deconstruct your characteristics well enough to make an accurate decision on your application.

Think: what is it about being an athlete that anyone can relate to? Not everyone is physically conditioning every other day. Not everyone is pushed to their physical limit during competitions. However everyone has at least once in their lives felt the sense of accomplishment after achieving victory, whether it be in sports or not. Many people are familiar with the feeling of camaraderie after struggling with a close team.

Work with the parts about sports that people can relate with. When you do, you will be both impressive and personable with your admissions officers.

Talk Less About the Sport Itself, Focus More on You.

The best way to write your college essay about sports is to remember this: the college essay is never about the topic itself.

• Writing your college essay about being the Tennis Captain? It’s not about Tennis.
• Writing your college essay about winning the Tae Kwon Do tournament? It’s not about Tae Kwon Do.
• Writing your college essay about helping your Badminton team through the tough times? It’s not about Badminton.

So, if you are trying to write your college essay about sports, but it’s not supposed to be about sports, what is it about?

Well, it’s about you.

We know this sounds cheesy, but it’s true.

The admissions officers are there to read your application essays because your essays are a tool. You can pour your emotional heart out and share the most meaningful stories about your match, but the college essay is a tool. It is a tool that helps the university gauge what kind of person you are.

In other words, if you want to write your college essay about sports without missing the whole point of the college app process, then you need to make it about you.

Be sure to emphasize what exactly the sport you’re writing about says about you. It may reveal you are a hard working person. It may reveal you are someone who does not get phased by failure, and takes on a stoic approach to obstacles.

If you are still struggling to write your college essay about sports, consider speaking with a college admissions expert. Schedule a free consultation with PenningPapers.com! We will give you a free essay analysis as well as advice over the phone. We’ll give you everything you need to write your way into the school of your dreams.