By the fall of his sophomore year, he was smart, motivated, and a little lost. A B student in the IB program at his public high school, he had strong but not standout grades and no clear sense of direction. What he did have was a lifelong love of sports—and a natural instinct for numbers.

By eighth grade, he was running fantasy football leagues for his friends, and by ninth, they were paying him to draft their teams because his data-based strategies kept winning. He didn’t call it analytics then, but that’s exactly what it was—pattern recognition, probability, and creative prediction.

Sophomore year became a turning point. His Algebra II grade climbed dramatically, and his confidence followed. The next fall, in September of his junior year, he scored a 750 on the SAT Math section, confirming what his summer experiences had already revealed: he wasn’t just good at numbers, he could use them to tell stories.

With the guidance of his ESM College MatchPoint coach, he began using his summers to explore, deepen, and apply that talent.

Summer Before Sophomore Year: Discovering Sports Analytics

His first step came with the Boston Leadership Institute’s Sports Analytics Program, a three-week summer experience that merged his two favorite worlds—math and sports.

He learned how to collect and analyze player data, build predictive models, and use statistics to explain strategy. It was like taking his fantasy football instincts and giving them scientific precision. For the first time, he saw how data could describe performance, leadership, and momentum.

That summer, math became more than a subject—it became a way to make sense of competition.

Summer takeaway: Start by connecting what students already love with academic skills they can grow. Early exploration builds energy and curiosity that carry into the school year.

Summer Before Junior Year: Seeing How Data Shapes Strategy

With his confidence rising, he wanted to see how analytics worked beyond the field. His coach encouraged him to apply to Georgetown University’s Sports Management Business Program, a pre-college experience that explored how sports organizations use data to make business and leadership decisions.

For three weeks, he lived on campus, worked with peers, and collaborated on team-based projects that mimicked real-world sports management. His group developed a mock franchise, using analytics to shape player contracts, marketing campaigns, and financial strategy.

He began to see that sports analytics wasn’t only about player stats—it was also about understanding people, decision-making, and long-term planning. That broader perspective helped him realize he wanted to study not just sports, but data itself.

Summer takeaway: Once a student finds a spark, the next step is expansion. Deepening an interest across disciplines builds both skill and maturity.

Summer Before Senior Year: Turning Data Into Discovery

By the summer before senior year, he was ready to lead his own project. Instead of another pre-college program, his college coach helped him design an independent data analysis project centered on the men’s swimming competitions at the 2024 Summer Olympics.

He spent weeks collecting race data from multiple international sources—split times, reaction speeds, and stroke rates across heats and finals. His goal was to understand what separated medalists from the rest of the field.

Working with a professional data scientist as a mentor, he used Python for data cleaning and modeling, and Matplotlib for visualizing trends in performance. His analysis revealed clear patterns in pacing strategy, turn efficiency, and reaction time—key metrics that consistently predicted podium finishes.

He then drew on the knowledge he had gained from his earlier summer programs to refine and present his findings, ultimately producing a publishable analysis recognized by the sports analytics community. The work demonstrated the same depth of thinking, technical precision, and storytelling that had first sparked his love of data years earlier through fantasy football.

By the end of the summer, he had built a professional-quality research portfolio that captured both his independence and his growth as a data storyteller.

Summer takeaway: The most meaningful summer work is self-directed. Independent projects show initiative, curiosity, and problem-solving—the very qualities colleges value most.

Connecting the Story

By senior year, his three summers told a story of curiosity turned into capability:

• Summer before sophomore year: Discovery—learning how data reveals the story inside sports.
• Summer before junior year: Expansion—understanding how analytics drive leadership and strategy.
• Summer before senior year: Ownership—applying data science independently to Olympic-level performance.

In his essays, he wrote about growing up watching UT football and realizing he wanted to understand what made winning teams different. He described how fantasy football became a training ground for critical thinking and how his summers helped him build from instinct to analysis.

Admissions officers at UT Austin saw more than a student with a lower GPA. They saw a student who had used his summers to take charge of his own learning and create a clear throughline of growth, focus, and impact.

The Outcome

When he received his acceptance to UT Austin’s Bachelor of Science in Statistics and Data Science, he knew he had built it step by step. His three summers had transformed a love of sports into technical fluency, confidence, and direction.

He started as a kid obsessed with fantasy football drafts. He became a researcher capable of explaining Olympic performance through data—and a future Longhorn ready to turn numbers into insight.



And even now, between coding projects and classes, he still finds time to make every home game at DKR, watching with both pride and precision.