$156,000 at Wabash College
Chose: Wabash College
Charlie’s problem wasn’t ability. It was that he had a 24, a lacrosse season, and no idea what to work on.
That last part matters more than parents usually expect. A student with a 24 who sits down for an hour has to decide, before anything useful happens, what that hour should contain. Reading? Math? Which part of math? Most students guess, and most guesses land on whatever they just did badly at, which is rarely the highest-value thing available.
Charlie was guessing. And he was guessing in the margins of a sport that ate most of his week.
Two sprints instead of one long slog
We ran Charlie against two test dates rather than one.
The first sprint took him from a 24 to a 29. That score got banked, and the second sprint started from there and finished at a 33.
Splitting it does two things. It gets a real score on the board early, which changes how a student feels about the whole project. And it lets the second sprint target what the first test actually exposed, rather than what a diagnostic predicted months earlier.
The part his mom noticed
Charlie’s mom didn’t have to nag him.
That sounds like a small thing next to nine points, and it isn’t. The most common thing we hear from parents before a student starts is some version of I’m tired of being the one who has to bring it up. The studying becomes a standing argument, and the argument does more damage to the household than the score does to the college list.
When the plan tells the student what to do each day and a coach is checking whether it happened, the parent stops being the enforcement mechanism. Charlie’s mom got to go back to being his mom.
Done by winter
Charlie finished the ACT in the winter of his junior year.
His classmates were still studying in the spring. He wasn’t. That freed the entire spring for lacrosse and for internships, which is the part that quietly did the most for his application. A junior spring spent on ACT prep is a junior spring not spent on anything a college would find interesting.
By the time applications came around, Charlie had a 33 and a resume built in the months everyone else spent on test prep.
The scholarship
Charlie scored a 33 and enrolled at Wabash College with a $39,000-a-year scholarship—$156,000 across a four-year degree.
His mother emailed us when the offer landed. The line was: “And it’s $39,000 annually!”
That’s what nine points is worth in cash for one student at one school. It varies enormously by student and by school, and it’s not a prediction for anyone else. But the arithmetic is worth doing once, because a lot of families evaluate ACT coaching as an expense without ever putting it next to the number on the other side.
What Charlie’s story shows
The two objections we hear most from families with an athlete are he doesn’t have time and I can’t be the one making him do it.
Charlie had less time than most and his mom refused to be the enforcement. He finished nine points up, before the season that mattered, with a scholarship that covers most of the cost of the degree.
What we did differently
- Split the work into two sprints against two test dates rather than one long grind, so the first score was banked before the second push started.
- Told him exactly what to work on each day, because his actual problem was not knowing where to point the limited time he had.
- Fit the daily work around lacrosse practice and games instead of asking him to choose between them.
- Handled the accountability ourselves so his mom didn't have to.
Coached by
Boosted Brains coaching team
Every Boosted Brains coach has a perfect or near-perfect ACT score and has been personally trained by Carson Weekley (perfect 36) and Martin (Head of Student Success).