Webinar with Barb Smith: Is Your Teen Hoping For an Academic Scholarship, Athletic, or Both?

All right, we are now recording. Uh, welcome everybody, it's just about time to get started. I have put in the chat, uh, please add your children's ages, where you're located, and what sport you play. If you don't play a sport and you want to play a sport, that's okay, you can put that too. Um, and that way we can speak directly to your situation. I think it's going to be important. The more we know about you, the better we can answer. Outstanding baseball, Ladera Ranch 17. Outstanding. Um, the other thing that might be helpful is, uh, if you can put, do you want to play D1, D2, D3, or don't know? I think that would be outstanding. No kids going to college soon, just learning for planning purposes. Awesome, I like it. Planning is good, planning is awesome. So we are just about gonna get started. Um, we're expecting a full house tonight, so I want to make sure everybody gets in, gets settled, and then we can get going. So I'll go ahead and share a little bit about myself. My name is Shellee Howard and I'm the founder and owner of College Ready. We help students get into college and graduate debt-free. So people are always amazed that's even possible. Let me give you a little bit of my story while we're waiting for people. Awesome, D1 or 2, we'll take 3, no doubt. Um, I grew up in Southern California. I went to a small public school and I played my sport there. I then went on to play softball for the USA. From there I went, uh, I actually did that during my, um, my junior, senior year, and then after that I went to college and played for about a year and got injured. So unfortunately my career was short I was a catcher, and without good knees, you're not a good catcher. So I love, love, love being a scholar athlete, and I'm so excited. I cannot wait to share. Barb Smith is here with you guys, and her story is phenomenal. And so I'm going to introduce her in a moment. The reason why College Ready got started is my firstborn was a soccer player, and he was playing club, and he was playing um, at high school, and he was playing a lot, and we were traveling like crazy. He played over in the summer in Europe, and we thought that he was gonna go, um, to college to play soccer. And it wasn't until his senior year that he said, I don't want to play anymore. And I'm like, what? You've been playing since you were 3. What are you talking about? He's like, yeah, I, I want to go to school. I want to go to college, and I just want to study. I can't make money playing soccer, and so I think I'm just gonna play in a mural. And I'm like, okay. So thank goodness, um, I did not count on that. And, uh, he had an academic side of him as well. That same son went off to Harvard, pre-med, and he actually walked on the rowing team. He was a walk-on as a freshman, never rode a boat before. He'd water skied before but never rode a boat. And he's like, "Mom, I'm an athlete. I think like an athlete. I know what athletes do. I train hard. I've got this." He made the JV team, so he got to row Harvard crew, and it was an awesome experience, but it really took away from his studies. And so he had to choose, and he chose his studies. That same young man went on to finish his degree from Harvard in 4 years. Go on to UC San Diego Medical School and is now an orthopedic surgeon working with athletes. So you never know where your athletic desire and leadership is going to take you. My second child, she was targeted to be a competitive cheerleader by age 12. She was on the— she was a nationally ranked competitive cheerleader, actually second best in the world. At 12 years old. So I'm like, yes, we've got an athlete, we've got a scholarship. And during a practice, she tumbled headfirst into a block wall. Luckily, it was just a concussion, but she then unfortunately got mind blocked and couldn't tumble again. So her story is now that she works with, with young children. She's a registered nurse in the pediatrics of an emergency room, and the neat thing about it is she's their cheerleader. She is the most inspiring nurse ever. So again, it didn't really take her where we thought it would, but it was such a wonderful experience. All right, we're gonna go ahead and jump in now, and enough about me. Uh, college ready, I will share a little bit after my special guest. So I'd like to go ahead and welcome Barb Smith for her to tell you about her Experience, which is phenomenal. Welcome, Barb.

Thank you so much, Shellee Howard. This is an honor. I'm very excited to share with the audience and to be part of your show. So thank you.

You are so welcome. Can you go ahead and tell the listeners a little bit about yourself? Like, how did you end up here and what exactly do you do?

Yes. So I played college basketball. I played for Ohio State and I had such a great experience there. And I was a walk-on, actually. I was 5'3" and a lot of people said, "You can't, you're not going to make it there. You've got to go somewhere else. You're not going to make it." And I was so driven by the fact that I wanted to prove these people wrong that I made the team, earned a scholarship, and played 4 years there and had a blast. We were 4 years. We won the Big Ten. We went to the NCAA and it was one of the best experiences of my entire life. And sports does that, you know, sports like you've, you know, you've experienced, I'm sure there's people on here that have either been or they have one, you know, a student athlete or there's athletes on here. It is a, it's something about athletics that just really, it just feeds your soul. So I went from college into coaching. I wanted to go into coaching. And the funny thing is, I went to Iona College in New York and I got my MBA in business. And I said to myself, if I ever stop coaching, I'm going to have this business degree and I'm going to, I'm going to run a business. So I coached women's college basketball for 30 years, loved every minute of it. The highs, the lows, the challenges, the so many athletes that I still stay in touch with. That have actually given back in this situation. And I've been able to do some things with them as well. So it just, you know, college sports just has just been awesome for me. And after 30 years of watching the recruiting process, because as a coach, you're in it the whole time in the recruiting process, I've, I've been able to see the difference between a thriving college experience and one that's just surviving. And those two experiences are so very, very different that if everybody on this call or in this webinar knew where they could go or where their child could go to get the thriving situation, they'd be okay with going to the moon. It's that, it's that different. Location wouldn't matter, cost wouldn't matter. They, they would want that experience because You are invested, you feel good, everything is going well. And not that every day is easy because you're challenged. Athletes like to be challenged anyways. You're challenged, some days are bad, but you are invested, you feel good about what you're doing, you feel like you're progressing. You're in academics as well, you feel like maybe you're getting networked and ready for after college and everything just goes well versus the surviving one, which is a lot of— there's a lot of people in this mode, and I get so passionate about this because it doesn't have to be this way. But surviving is— it's hard to get up to go to practice. It's hard to get, you know, to go to class. It's, it's, it's a drudgery, you know. You just, you, you just feel like it's, it's, uh, you picked wrong. You— it's too much. It's, you know, a lot of people transfer. Or stop playing. And so, you know, right now in high school, most student athletes still love the game. And in college, it gets a little different and a lot of people will fall out of love with their sport. And I am committed to helping young people find that thriving situation because I played basketball long after college. I still loved it. I still love it. And, you know, now I'm 100 years old, Shellee, and so I have to stretch more now, and maybe I can't— don't have the range I used to, but I would still go out and play. I just love sports. I love watching them. And so, long story short, it led me to— I had one situation. I had, you know, a situation where my last job, I had a student athlete who was a tremendous player, had a great family, loved them to death. We were left when I took this job without a point guard. In basketball, that's pretty major of a situation. So we went out, we worked hard, we put all our eggs in this one basket because we had to. We were late to the game. We got this player. She was a great leader on her team, club team. You know, she was surrounded by great players and we did all the research and we brought her in and she floundered as a freshman. Floundered as a freshman. And I take full responsibility that we didn't do something right because great family, great player, you know, she worked hard, but the problem is it wasn't a fit for her when she was in the club situation. She was surrounded by other great players. She didn't have to carry the load. Coming to our situation, she was the point guard. She had to carry all of the load and then be the leader in the point guard situation. And she didn't— she wasn't ready for it. And so she ended up transferring. And that led me to find my team because we didn't ask the right questions and she didn't ask the right questions. And so now I know what questions you should ask. When you're, when you're researching schools. So I want to do— can I do a little presentation? Can I share my screen here? Absolutely. Um, let's see if I can— yeah, let's see if I can make this work now.

You got this.

All right, here we go. That is not it. Let's see here. All right, let's see if everybody can see this here.

I see you.

Outstanding. I'm going to put this in presenter mode. Bear with me, everybody. Slideshow. Here we go. All right, so I kind of talked about myself a little bit there and what's led to this. So I want to start with just an analogy. If you were going to buy a car, you wouldn't purchase that car you saw in the lot. It's shiny, there's a lot of bling, you love it, but you wouldn't buy that car without test driving it, without getting all the, the specs, without knowing if it fits you right, drives right, feels right, is the right color. All those things, uh, you would test it out first. The recruiting process is similar to that. You want to try things on first. You want to, you know, you want to put something on, you want to test drive it, you want to get on campus, you want to make sure that it's got your academic field and all those things. You want to research it before you purchase it. Today's recruiting process doesn't do too much of that, and I'll explain as we go. The second very important point is every recruiting journey is different. Everybody's journey is going to be different. People come into it late, start early. We have people from 8th grade to seniors who come in and want help with the recruiting process, and everyone's different. Even if you had, you know, a twin playing the same sport, living in the same house, those two recruiting journeys would be different, and we'd set them up differently. And it's all personal. And here's some math for you. 76%, this is Find My Team research, 76% of athletes right now in high school have no recruiting plan in place. They're just going, they're just, it's gonna be organic and they're just going with the flow. 76 is a large number. 75% of parents who have student athletes in college say if they had to do it again, they would have asked more help, they would have gotten more guidance, they would have done it differently. 90% of college coaches say the problem with the recruiting process is there is no way to get good relationships with your kids before they get to campus. So the relationship building occurs in the first and second year. And by that time, a lot of players are either quitting or transferring. And then lastly, there's this thing called the transfer portal. Is anyone— have you heard, people on the call, have you heard of the transfer portal? And have you heard of the things like names, image, and likeness, transfer portal, collectives? Are these terms that sound familiar to you? Because that's what's happening now with the recruiting process. It is really, really changing. It has changed a lot and it changes right now because It's sort of like the wild, wild west because the NCAA hasn't figured out how to tame all this down. So we can go into it. I don't have time to go into it a lot tonight, but players can get paid now. Transferring is easier. There's collectives, booster people that used to not be able to give you a piece of gum to chew can now give money to the athletes. So it's really, really a different environment, and you need to be prepared to understand all that. So the top 3 things that we're going to just go over, and this is brief, but understanding how it works, how to make it work for you, and then just some basic steps. If you left tonight and could just go do these things, you'd be off to a great start. And if you have younger student athletes, uh, younger people in your family that are going to go through this, then this is a great time to listen in here. So as I mentioned before, I've had 35 years of doing this. And when I talk to parents and student athletes, usually they're in two camps as far as the recruiting process goes. Either they're, they've got it all under control and they think that their, their athletes are, they're on a club team, they're getting some interest. They might be getting a phone call or two or a letter or two, and they think it's going well. The other camp is they're freaking out, they're panicked, stressed, overwhelmed, don't know where to begin, and it's, it's, it's causing a lot of angst within the family. I've even seen divorces and families break up because of the recruiting process. Both of these scenarios are dangerous, and they're dangerous because in the first camp when you think you have it under control, typically what's happened is you're sitting back and you're waiting for a college coach to come to you. You're being seen, you're getting exposed on these, on these club programs. And so you're waiting. And so in that scenario, many, many times what happens is who, whatever, whichever program, whichever coach shows you the most attention, that's where you go. So everything else that's important to you, all your values and needs, all that gets shelved. You're sitting back and you're just waiting for the coach who you may or may not like. Eventually you're going to go there because they showed the most love. That's disaster. The other situation where you're freaking out, you're not sure where to go or what to do. You're also sitting back and waiting and you're frozen. And so time goes on. And then at the, at the 11th hour, You decide that you've got to start doing stuff and it turns into this frantic, stressed out, we've got to make quick decisions and get this over with. And a lot of times those athletes are like, I'm done with this. I'm just going here because. Again, that's disaster. So one thing, and as I mentioned, there's a lot of changes going on in, in the, in the recruiting world. One thing that Find My Team prides ourself on, I think we might be The only program that is not exposure-driven. In other words, there are lots of people out there who are going to help you get exposure, send your stuff up, help, you know, help you get exposure, but very few are going to take you by your hand and walk you through the process, make it custom to you, and have the student athlete own it. We pride ourselves in getting the student athlete in the front seat of that car and driving their own process and being able to pick up a phone and call coaches, uh, write letters, do emails, know how to ask for help, know who to ask for help, know what questions to ask, and really do the work to find out where they want to go. And, and you'd be amazed at what these, these young student athletes, uh, are capable of. And I've had people who say, come into the program, I'm only going Division I, we've got to get a scholarship. And by the end of the program, they turned down the scholarship to go Division III, which many of you might know that Division III doesn't have athletic scholarships. So they're going to pay to play. But as Shellee knows, there are ways to fund Division III that, you know, a lot of people wouldn't even choose that, wouldn't even look at that for the reason that they think they can't afford it. I've had other people come to me as seniors, have done nothing. They just want to play somewhere. They're thinking they're going to go, you know, NAIA or junior college or, or maybe Division III. And they ended up getting the Division I scholarship because they did the work to do what they needed to do to find the place. So it's very individual. And when the, when the student athlete commits to doing the work, he or she finds where they're supposed to be. So here's how you make it work for you. And here's just 6 basic simple steps. If you can do anything, even if you're a senior right now, if you can do anything to become more self-aware, which means trying on different things, anything, try a different, you know, try a food that you haven't liked, try different genres of books, movies. Try different things because it helps you understand who you are. We have an assessment that we give every student athlete that comes into our, our program, and this assessment helps them really understand what they might want in a college experience. And we ask questions that they wouldn't know to ask, they wouldn't know to think about these things, But it really helps them draw out what's important. So now they have a GPS, and that's where we start with the recruiting process. So anything you can do to help yourself, take trips without mom and dad, you know, send them to camp. If you are mom and dad, send them away. Let them experience stuff away from home. You know, make them do laundry. All these things that, that they can do to just become more self-aware. I already talked about exposure, but understanding that exposure plays a role but should never ever drive your recruiting process. And that's where you sit back and wait for the coaches to come to you. And then what we do is, is just a step-by-step guide. If you don't have Find My Team, find somebody that has the experience, that knows what's going on in the recruiting world right now, and ask them for guidance. It's very important to have that person. And then how to set up communication. There's emails, text, there's social media, there's phone calls. There's so many things that, that you can do in communication that get your name to the top of piles and piles of emails and texts and letters in the mail and, and all of that. You've got to find a way to get to the top. And some of it is marketing yourself. And we go through all of that. And then these last two things kind of go together, but basically when you research a school right now, you might go on and Google, you know, a college and get some information, but you're just getting information. When you have gone through the self-awareness stage and the assessment stage and you know exactly what you want, now you know what you're looking for when you research. So you're researching with things that are important to you, how to find out if the college has them, who to ask, how to ask, and your research becomes very purposeful, and that's a lot more helpful than just straight Google searches. And then when you narrow your list, you're narrowing with knowledge, and when you narrow with knowledge, you're making much better decisions and the chances of you staying at the place that you first choose go up tenfold. So the difference between thriving and surviving college— I've seen it. I've seen it, and that's why I get so passionate about it. Every student athlete deserves to find that thriving college. I truly believe there is a place for everybody. I truly believe if you want to play sports, that you can play. And there is a place. And it may not always be what you look— what, what you initially have in your head, but if it's a place where you thrive, none of that matters. You're going to be happy and you're going to be set up for your future. So if you come work with us, we have unprecedented guidance and support. We're a proven system with the most robust platform out there, and the student athlete does most of the work. And when they do that work, they're fulfilled as well. And mom and dad, you don't have to be so stressed out. You can let them do it. You feel— you'll be in the process. You'll just be in the back seat and they'll, they'll tell you when they need something and you'll be there and it will be a family event. But your, your son or your daughter gets to drive it and you'll be amazed, like I said, at what they find and how happy they can be. So I can't I can't not, uh, emphasize that when you are looking for fit, and this is going to be where I transition to you, Shellee Howard, you're— a lot of student athletes just look at the sport and they think academics will take care of itself. And this is where this program, Shellee's program, is so very important because you can't have one without the other. A lot of people are starting in college, are leading scorers or hitters or loving the sport part, but they're not happy on campus. They're not happy in class. They're not happy and they still transfer. So it isn't just one or the other. If you're going to do it as a student athlete, you got to do it as a student athlete, which, which puts all of it together. So I'm going to stop that sharing right there. Let's see how I get back to where I'm at here. Okay. And I don't know if anyone has questions or not. I know, Shellee, I can't wait to hear your part, actually, because I'm so blessed to be part of this partnership and, you know, I think together we can really help people, a lot of people just continue to thrive and sports can be part of it.

For sure. So thank you, Barb, so much. And if you have questions, I'm only going to share for probably 10, 15 minutes and we're going to open it up to questions. You can either put them in the chat or, you know, you can reach out to us after. That's totally fine as well. Um, but I'm going to go ahead and share the academic side of things. I told you that I was a scholar athlete, and so I do understand without academics there is no athletics. Um, we go to college hopefully to get both, and the scholar athlete I think is the ultimate way to accomplish that. Now, there's so many ways you can do that, right? You can be the big fish in the small sea athletically or academically. So let's talk a little bit for a moment about how you start the process academically, because this is where a lot of people— I so resonated when parents are either really, really on top of it and they start SAT prep in 3rd grade, or they're like, you know, we'll just wait and see what happens, and you know, Yeah, so I see the whole gamut. We work with students from 7th grade on all the way through transferring, PhD level, and I mean, we just— the whole thing. We don't help students necessarily prior to 7th grade. They're just not quite ready yet, but we can give you some good feedback as far as, you know, helping them love to read and, you know, doing fun things to learn. So really, the question always gets asked to me, when is the best time to start? The best time to start is when your student is ready. And how do you know they're ready? They're curious. They want to know, what is that thing on the wall there? Oh, that's a diploma. Well, what's a diploma? And you start to just have these organic conversations. Or when you're out on a family vacation— I remember we were in Boston My son must have been in 5th grade, and we were visiting family, and I said, hey, why don't we stop at Harvard? It's supposed to be amazing. I've never been. I was not a consultant at the time, and we went, and I remember my son going, whoa, that's the coolest thing I've ever seen. Little did we know that would be his college of choice. Back then, it was just a really neat campus with a lot of skateboarders and bikers on it. Like, that's— he pictured school pretty awesome. And so incorporating it gently, like you would a museum, like you would an amusement park, and telling them the G-rated stories of your experience at college is a wonderful way to start early. You don't have to start asking them, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Because I promise you, it will change. Except for my oldest, he knew in 8th grade he wanted to be a surgeon. That didn't change. But all the rest of my kids, I have 4 kids, they all changed. So it's okay that they change, but guess what? Their core values will not. They get deeper. They get more convicted. So if your child starts to understand their core values, their gifts, their talents, their advocacy, you will be amazed at how well they transition to college. So I'm going to talk a little bit about how do you get into college now and what are colleges looking for. I'm going to share my screen. Before I do, I want to let you know that I'm going to share with you a custom student portal that I had created because when my firstborn went through this process, I had 17 Google Sheets and it was really, really painful every time we went to visit them. So when I started this with my second child, I'm like, there's just got to be a better way, and that's when I launched College Ready. So off we went. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen, and we're going to talk a little bit about what colleges are looking for, right? We know what students want. Students want to go to a really awesome school. And awesome is different for every student. Do they want the academic fit? Do they want the social fit? Do they want the athletic fit? Do they want the financial fit? Or do they want it all, right? In a perfect world, we get it all. And that's what Barb is on tonight, because I, I help a lot of scholar athletes, but what I find out is if they're not prepared to find the right school or how to do the recruitment process, it doesn't turn out great. I actually have the kicker of Penn right now. He was one of my students and he got jostled around a bit. I became his big advocate for a while and, you know, luckily he got into Penn as an academic and then he walked on and now he's the kicker. Such a cool story. So anyway, I can get off track. Um, this is Vincent. He is my fake student. I love Vincent. He lets me inside of his portal. Every one of our students and parents has a password-protected portal. We create a standout strategy for the student. What does that mean? The academic fit. In other words, we plan out their academic plan, their testing strategy, their passion with purpose strategy, their leadership and extracurricular strategy, their letters of recommendation strategy, and the essay strategy. So as you're doing your athletics, just know everybody else is working their whole academic plan as well. So in order to compete at the Stanfords, UCLAs of the world, you have to have it all. And that's okay, because it can be fun if you know how to do it well. So I'm going to show you how we do it. What I'm about to show you is not in Google and is not in U.S. News and World Report. The information I'm showing you is from my ethics organization of who got in last year. So this is the real stuff. Before I dive in, this is what the portal looks like. Then we can go into any college in the world, literally in the world. And because I saw there was a Stanford fan, I'm going to go ahead and pick on Stanford. Absolutely love Stanford, awesome school. And I'm going to show you what Stanford's all about, right? Most students look at 3% admittance and go, uh, I'm out, I don't have a perfect GPA. That's not it. I had several students get into Stanford this year without a perfect GPA and without a perfect test score. So be careful to assume anything in this world. College is quite interesting right now. You can see that right here, 81% of students graduate in 4 years. A lot of people ask me, well, why not 100%? A lot of times students do a double major, or they're scared to take too many classes at once, which extends their time. And so be thoughtful when I show you the tuition, what the cost is. The thing that I, I want you to know is the retention rate is 98%. So if you want to transfer into Stanford, you have about a 2% chance. It is easier, right? 3% chance when you're an undergrad. So kind of keep that in mind. Here is the women and men who applied, who were admitted, and who were enrolled. Now you can look at— this is it, guys. You want to know what it takes? On a 4.0 scale, the average student across all majors has a 3.96. The average test score is dark purple. My student Vincent has a 3.6, so he has a, um, a slot, a small chance for his GPA but he has an outstanding chance for his test score. Right now he's 50/50 statistically. Then you look at the cost of attendance, in-state or out-of-state, it doesn't matter. It's a private school, and so some students will shiver at this, or maybe not the students but the parents. And then you look at the breakdown. Well, once the student moves off campus, if they do, you can increase this number because it's in a very expensive neighborhood. The other thing I like students to know is we can tell you the chances of getting scholarships, grants, awards, everything you want to know. Last year, over the last 2 years, our students earned over $20.3 million in scholarships on top of need-based. What does that mean? There's a ton of money out there. Do not Listen to all the social media rantings. If you do it right, there's a ton of money. All 4 of my children will graduate debt-free, and they're nothing more than any of your children. We can show you what are the opportunities as far as ROTC, any specialty academic career counseling. And then it gets really interesting because when I ask a student, why Stanford? They'll just say, duh, it's Stanford. But what they don't think about is Stanford doesn't have every major, at least for undergrad. So if you have a student who wants to go into business for undergrad, this is not a good school for them for undergrad. That's a problem. And when you're a D1 athlete, just know they pick your major most of the time, not all the time. My son's roommate um, was a baseball player for Harvard, and I got to see firsthand what that equaled to. Let me tell you, they have a big say when they're paying for a student. The next thing I like students to see is the essays it takes to get in. At Stanford, you're looking at 15 essays on top of any scholarship opportunities. So we want students to know that's 15 different topics you have to write about. You can't write about the same thing. So if all you're doing is your sport, that's not going to pay off academically. So we help our scholar athletes understand you have to be more than your sport. You have to have things to be able to talk about. Identity, interest, talent, or lessons we take from obstacles, or reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief. These are thought-provoking questions. Then you need between, you need at least 10 activities and they need to be important. Our students have an opportunity to win or earn, sorry, earn 8 bronze, silver, and gold awards. 4 for the Congressional Award and 4 for the Presidential Award. That's 8 nationally recognized awards. That's on top of being, you know, athlete of the month or athlete of the year or whatever that may look like. So today I got a phone call that somebody wants me to bring into our program, most likely to be a professional baseball player, and we were strategizing what else he needs to do other than just baseball. You look at these called required supplements and optional. Be careful, these are not optional. You need to know. Knowledge is power. We then help students get real clear on what is a good list of colleges and what does it take to get in, because there are so many different ways to get into college. Early action, regular decision, um, right? I mean, you go through here— early decision, early action too— all of these have statistical chances of you or your student getting in. So what we help students understand is everything they need to do academically to get accepted, right? Scholar athlete or not, they still have to get accepted. And gone are the days where the coach has the final say. The board still has to let them in. So just know these things still have to be done even if you have a scholar athlete. A lot of times the coach will help nurture you through the process, but it's still got to be done like everybody else. So we simplify this for their students, for our students. We give them the direct link. You know, Vanderbilt is an awesome baseball school. I've had students go there to play baseball. But we still had to get them in. And so we help them understand all of the due dates, all of the deadlines, and these are updated, um, for our students in real time. So as they release, um, we give our students this information. They don't have to go and find it. From there, we put it into a calendar and connect it to their cell phone because we know they're never without their cell phone. Therefore, this is an accountability program as well. For students who don't know what they want to major in, we also have 4 different assessments. But we don't just hand it to them, we talk about it with them, and we help them understand what major leads to what career and how much will they make. And will a robot be doing their job in 5 years? What? Yes, that is a real true statement at this point. The final tab is the student's favorite tab, and that is the writing tab. That is where we assist them in brainstorming their activities and their essays. We don't write them, but we have professional editors that polish them. So I hope you can see that these are all going to be very important, and I want you to be prepared. That is the key to success. As Barb stated, what we don't know going into college can, could cause a transfer. In an academic world, that's $100,000 to the bottom line. Ouch! That's emotionally traumatizing to most students. Ouch! It's better to do it right from the beginning. I'm going to go ahead and open it up to questions. We have about 15 minutes. If anybody has a question, please put it in the chat. We are not going on live, so we will take questions from the chat. If there are no questions in a minute or so, we will go ahead and let you know. In the meantime, while you're thinking of your question and putting it into chat, I wanted to let you know how you can reach me or Barb. So College Ready, right there, college-ready-plan.com, is the best way to learn about our different programs. We help students from a 3.0 to a 5.0, from a great, you know, test score to no test score. There's a strategy for every student. And so please understand that standing out with a passion, with purpose project, something that is uniquely yours, is the key to success. No longer is it just a GPA, a test score, or good batting stats or shooting stats. You have to have more than that. Colleges are looking for diversity, and they're looking for students who are going to bring something to the school, not just take something away. So I don't see anybody putting questions in the chat, which means Barbara and I must have done a really great job. And so I want you to know this will be available to those of you who were on the call today. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and thank you all. And Barb, do you have anything you'd like to add before we say goodbye?

Yeah, I just want to thank everyone for, for coming on, and I'll put my, my link here in the, in the chat as well. If anyone just wants to go to the website and, and take a more of a deeper dive, feel free. Um, my, my, a way to get in touch with me is on the website. Or, you know, you can email me at Barb@findmyteam.com and you will reach me. But, you know, I, as you're talking, it just really resonated that, you know, lots of athletes, uh, choose a college for the athletics and lots of, uh, opportunities are missed. And you're right about, you know, college coaches helping people. Um, getting the right, the right majors so they can stay eligible. So they don't have to give a lot of time to studies because, you know, this is, this is the, this is the way it works with, with college sports, especially the higher you go. It's, they have to win. They, coaches have to win or they'll get fired. So they prioritize differently. And that brings me back to, to what you're saying is you, You don't want a situation where you're going through college and you're in a major that you're not going to use or, or that you're not going to like when you leave college. You really want to go into it, and that's why I was saying the questions that you ask and how you find this stuff out. You've got the whole College Database there, which is just tremendously useful in that because you want to go to a place that's going to meet all of your needs, not just not just one or two.

Great way to sum it up. So thank you all very much for your time, and we wish you all the best. Please let us know if we can help you in any way. Have a wonderful evening.

Bye-bye. Thank you all.