But all I did was swim! Yes, you can write your essay about sports.

This summer alone, I have three students writing about sports. Every one of them asked some version of the same question: "Is this really okay? I heard you weren't supposed to write about sports."

I’ve heard this too – Sports show up on almost every “banned topics” list you’ll find online. But for varsity and club sport athletes, it’s the single biggest commitment of their childhood and left them little time for anything else.  Even for students who didn’t continue with competitive sports, time on a team as a child can be a formative experience that pushed them out of their comfort zone, made them confront their limitations, etc.  While sports is a common topic, it is also the clear winner for many students. Luckily, there is a way to write a stand-out sports essay that won't get lumped in with all the others an admissions reader will see.

A sports essay requires two important elements to be distinctive and memorable.

The first is the story itself. Most sports essays default to the same handful of moments: the championship game, the underdog win, the season-ending injury, the comeback. These are the moments that felt biggest while they were happening, so it makes sense that students reach for them. But they're also the moments every other applicant reaches for.

The second is the theme. Even when a student picks a less obvious story, the essay often lands on one of a small set of takeaways: resilience, the value of teamwork, you can't control what happens, only your reaction. These are true things. They're also things an admissions reader has read five hundred times this season.

A strong sports essay needs to clear both bars – an unexpected story and a theme that shows more thought than the obvious ones. Either one alone isn't enough. A fresh story that ends in "and that's when I learned the value of hard work" still reads as generic.

The good news is that when a story is genuinely unexpected, the reader knows it within the first few lines – and that alone buys you the benefit of the doubt to develop a theme that's uniquely yours.

Here’s what that looks like:

Example 1: He found out his team was disqualified from the playoffs the same way everyone else did – from a news article. The violation had nothing to do with him, but for a week, it was his identity in the headlines: cheater, before he'd ever done anything wrong. He went back to the team, but something had changed in how he showed up.

Expected theme: You can't control what happens to you, only how you respond.

His theme: Being part of something bigger than yourself means inheriting its failures, not just its glory – so next time, keep a piece of yourself separate.

Example 2:  When his coach was fired, he watched almost everyone he trained with – his friends, the fastest swimmers on the team – leave within a couple of days. He could have followed them. Instead he stayed with a program that had gotten noticeably slower and smaller.

Expected theme: Loyalty means sticking with the people and places that have shaped you, even when it's hard.

His theme: The team had given him years of coaching and belonging – leaving the moment that stopped being convenient would have meant only taking, never giving back.

Example 3:  He was a gifted violinist, good enough that his teacher was shocked when he gave it up. He was also a swimmer — solid, hardworking, but never someone his coaches saw as exceptional. When he ran out of hours in the day to do both, he kept the sport where no one thought he was special.

Expected theme: Passion matters more than talent.

His theme: Sometimes chasing what you love means going against everyone else's certainty about which one you should keep.

These are all big, dramatic moments, but smaller, odder moments can work too: a truthful but harsh correction from a coach, a teammate who kept playing after his second concussion, a bloody nose from getting kicked in the face another swimmer.

So, is it okay to write about sports? For the right student, it's not just okay – it's the strongest material they have. The topic was never the problem. In the end, your essay isn’t just about sports. It’s about YOU - your experience and what you learned.