Let’s address the elephant in the room: yes, you can write about a college essay about volleyball. Some of the ones we worked on with clients were accepted into great schools like UCLA, UCB, Cornell, and NYU.
So, volleyball can be a great topic.
But, it’s not the topic that makes the essay special. It’s about how you write it.
Today, we’ll be covering how to do exactly that. This guide covers everything you need to know about how to write your college essay about volleyball. We also provided one of our example college essays about volleyball that we worked on that worked.
Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
- A Professional Editor’s Tip.
- How to Write Your College Essay About Volleyball
- Successful College Essay About Volleyball Example.
A Professional Editor’s Tip.
Here’s the thing: a lot of consultants and advisors in the college admissions sphere have strong opinions about writing about sports. If you’ve been anywhere near TikTok, YouTube, Instagram Reels, etc, you’ve probably heard the same thing.
“You can’t talk about sports, it’s too cliche!”
“Admissions officers don’t care about that big game you won!”
In reality, these statements are obtuse oversimplifications of an otherwise more holistic process. Most college essay advice about sports, let alone volleyball, is too simplistic.
Volleyball is a fantastic topic for college essays. You just need to write about it with nuance and creativity.
But, let’s also be frank for a second: there are still a lot of people writing about sports. College essays about volleyball are still about sports. So, you’re competing against the other basketball, baseball, water polo, and tennis players.
In other words, you’ll have competition. Cut and dry.
So, to make the most of your college essay about volleyball without sounding generic, get a creative college essay editor. Not like the other editors who are so firm as to cancel out sports altogether as a topic. You need an editor who can think creatively. This is because it takes creativity and flexibility to write a solid sports-related college essay.
Now, we’re going to toot our own horn here. We have the creativity and expertise to do exactly that. We’ve helped countless students in the past write solid college essays about volleyball and many other sports. So, if you’re looking for a good editor who is creative and can write common topics with nuance, consider speaking with us! We provide students with free consultations and they can decide after a short trial whether they’d like to do editing services with us!
How to Write Your College Essay About Volleyball
There are a lot of things that make a great essay. Strong grammatical structure. Good usage of imagery. Connecting to your other supplement or Common App essay(s). So on and so forth. But, we wanted to focus more on the difficult stuff for this article.
Here are 5 points we believe are most important to consider when writing about volleyball.
Sports CAN Be Cliche; But, It’s Not ALWAYS Cliche.
As we mentioned in the Editor’s Tip section above: volleyball and any sport for that matter is common in college essays.
This runs the risk of being cliche. However, this does not mean ALL college essays writing about volleyball or other sports are cliche. You can write solid college essays about volleyball that blow people out of the water.
Again: it’s about HOW you write about the topic, not WHAT you write about.
To write a solid college essay about volleyball, make the story surrounding it special and unique. Avoid overused hooks like…
“…everyone clapped when I made the score…”
or
“…the air was filled with [insert emotion]”
It’s up to you to twist things up by using a different perspective when writing about volleyball. And hey, if you can be unique, you’ll look much better than most other students who write generic sports essays! We’ll cover how to write about volleyball uniquely in the next section below.
Oh, and if you’re not sure how to write about sports in your college essay in general, read up on our sister article. You can find it below.
Spice Things Up With a Twist.
So, how exactly do you make a college essay about volleyball unique? There are balls, there’s a score, you make the score, and everyone cheers. How can you make that special?
Well, you can start by going against the grain.
Imagine in your head what most of your volleyball teammates would say. What do they feel about the sport as a whole?
“It’s so fun playing volleyball with friends during the summer holidays at the beach!”
“I love the camaraderie of working alongside my fellow teammates.”
“Volleyball can get quite intense, especially since I’m a competitive person.”
These are all ideas that float in most of our volleyball students’ heads rent-free. If you try to write what everyone else writes, there’s not going to be much to help you stand out. Instead, think of some of the opinions or perspectives you have that divert from the norm. What do you think or feel that most fellow volleyball players might disagree with?
One such example may include the way you condition your body for practice. Perhaps you train differently by motivating yourself with a special playlist you’ve curated on Spotify. Maybe you use math a lot more than your peers when covering strategy, which is how you got into mathematics despite being a liberal arts major. These are just but a few examples.
A good way you can make a unique college essay about volleyball is to think about an “unpopular opinion” you have about the sport. What is something you feel about playing volleyball that most other people can’t exactly agree with you on? This breathes life into your essay and gives a take that is certainly going to help you stand out in a way that can surprise admissions officers. It’s especially strong if this unpopular take is both scathing and true!
Of course, there are many elements and perspectives you can look at on the topic of volleyball. We’ll show you how to use that to your advantage below.
There’s More to the Topic Than You Think.
Before you write something unique, you need to look at volleyball beyond the surface. That is, don’t just look at what it IS. Rather, look at the elements surrounding the sport as a whole.
Beyond just throwing the ball in the air and hitting it, you’ve got a few other very important factors.
- Feeling inferior to others.
- The fear of missing out.
- Strength as a woman.
- Leadership when managing chaotic moments.
- The creativity required to play a solid move.
- Overcoming the lazy parts of our mind that want to avoid practice.
There’s a lot you can say that revolves around volleyball but doesn’t involve the actual “playing” of volleyball itself. And, those topics have a lot to them. Use these elements to your advantage. It will turn your essay from being only about volleyball to one about both the sport and its other surrounding themes.
This adds a layer of depth to your essay that transcends just playing the game alone.
Here’s an example:
Your essay may start with a description of a game you recently played; then, instead of making the applause exciting, you downplay it. You surprise your readers by saying you actually don’t like the applause because you don’t quite feel comfortable accepting compliments. Suddenly, the essay has transformed from a volleyball college essay to a journey on self-acceptance.
So, remember: start with an unusual twist such as an “unpopular opinion”, then shift that to make the essay about more than just volleyball alone.
The Inexorable Question of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Just about every university you come across in North America is going to take diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) seriously when assessing your application. It’s not a matter of when. They already do it. That is, how would your presence on their campus help contribute to their DEI goals?
Fortunately for you, volleyball works very well as a topic when you want to leverage DEI.
In volleyball, you’ll be able to use your position in a female-dominated sport to your advantage. If you’re a man in volleyball, you are in an opposite-gender-dominated field and can speak of this in the context of DEI. For women in volleyball, you can discuss women’s sports and the kinds of intricacies that come with that under the context of DEI.
When writing your college essay about volleyball, take the time to think about how you’ll be able to contribute to a campus’ DEI. While the prompt may not always ask you directly for your opinion about diversity or the other two, they will still likely keep those three ideas in mind.
At the same time, you shouldn’t feel obligated to make the entire essay about DEI.
You can make your volleyball college essay grace the topic of DEI without having to go fully in-depth with it. That is, mention it in passing. Or, have themes of DEI implied throughout the essay, whilst the main topic stays different.
Talk About Your Volleyball Experience With Another Person.
The next tip: show your volleyball college essay to other people. Show it to people who are not volleyball players too.
This works well since you’re essentially sharing your essay with outsiders. Additionally, non-volleyball players have perspectives outside the volleyball echo chamber. In fact, outsiders may have ideas in their field of expertise that actually complement your experience. They can help you see your essay from a different perspective you wouldn’t have otherwise considered.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you show your volleyball college essay to a friend named Jeff. Jeff doesn’t consider himself a fan of the sport, let alone sports in general.
In fact, as a quant, he finds comfort in the world of business, venture capital, finance, and mathematics. Just because Jeff enjoys math doesn’t mean he can’t contribute an interesting perspective to your essay. Some of his interests in math, for example, the theories that go behind positioning and strategy, may provide you with an unusual quantitative perspective that you otherwise may not have originally considered.
Another cool trick you can do is ask your peers what they “feel” about your volleyball essay. Don’t ask whether they think it’s a good essay. And, don’t ask for advice. Rather, have them focus on the feeling they get and the impressions that come when they read through the whole essay.
By focusing more on feeling, you can more easily deconstruct the more nuanced problems with your essay.
Here’s an example: you ask Jeff for his opinion again. And, this time, you ask him how the volleyball essay makes him feel. He mentions how the details about hard work are something he can relate to, especially since he also has days where he puts in 101%. But, he also shares how he as an outsider to sports finds it quite fascinating how your essay can still be relatable.
This opens up the idea of how hard work and effort can feel quite universal no matter the subject or field. A linebacker works hard in the same way chefs do. Teachers work hard in the same way nurses work hard. Just by asking how the reader feels about the essay, you can conjure new and interesting themes to include in your essay. In this case, it’s the universality of hard work.
Successful College Essay About Volleyball Example.
Now that we’ve discussed the 5 crucial points to writing a successful college essay about volleyball, let’s take a look at an example. This essay was written by a student of ours and edited thoroughly.
They made use of our custom college admissions essay editing services to get it to its final draft.
Additionally, this essay is in response to the UC essay prompt 5, which reads: “Describe the most significant challenge you have faced and the steps you have taken to overcome this challenge. How has this challenge affected your academic achievement?”
“I don’t like volleyball.
I like it. Except, I don’t. It’s a salad chaos. Specifically, I enjoy most of volleyball; that is, like 95% of it. But, it’s that other 5% –that minute fraction of a fraction of volleyball– that I truly dread from bottom of my heart.
It’s those small moments when the ball makes its way toward my direction and my catastrophizing anxious brain conjures in a split second a premonition along the lines of “you’ll screw up royally, and the opposing team will laugh while your team will shame you” that disorients me enough to cost a decent shot –leaving my cortisol levels to spike while I imagine how I’d survive the embarrasmment and shame.
Actually, it’s not even really a volleyball-specific thing. Rather, it’s more a “me thing.”
This catastrophizing and anxiety had a death grip on my life. And, I’ve tried everything to fix it. I tried to block out thoughts, use logical reasoning to “logic” it all away, and even regulate my diet to reduce anxiety-prone foods. Yet, nothing worked.
It wasn’t until I started meditating and exercising active meta cognition that I’ve come to realize the root of my anxious mind: a soft, gentle narcissism.
Sounds weird, right? Well, essentially I’ve concluded that my covertly narcissistic thinking –not to be confused by delusions of grandiosity– had a symbiotic relationship with my lack of self esteem. That is, my subtly narcissistic related everything to my self, whilst the negative self worth made said relations negative. Essentially, I saw everything as about me and how I was insufficient regardless of relevance.
Overriding this mindset meant overriding the mental wiring I’ve grown up with for 18 years. But, with much metacognitive meditation and practice in self acceptance, I’ve come to regulate my emotions significantly better.
And, paradoxically enough, it made me a better volleyball player by establishing more synergy with fellow teammates instead of thinking only of myself. Henceforth, in and past volleyball, I’d like to further master my mind throughout my academic journey.”
Successful College Essay About Volleyball Example, UC Essay Prompt 5, PenningPapers 2024
If you have any other questions about how to write a solid college essay about volleyball, don’t worry. We’ve helped countless student-athletes and non-athletes write powerful college essays that stood out. Our strategy involves in-depth sessions involving everything from brainstorming to essay drafting. Schedule a free consultation with us, and we’ll get back to you within 24 hours!
