Personal Essay
For most students, touring colleges entails setting up a scheduled time for a tour during a day trip to the campus. I, however, had a different way of touring colleges. Since I have been diving for most of my life and plan to stick with it in college, I reached out to a few schools in hopes of securing an official visit. An official visit means the university pays for all your travel expenses and provides you with a place to stay, a host (usually someone on the team), food to eat, paid meals, and activities to do. There is a maximum of five official visits allowed per athlete due to NCAA regulations, so I knew I needed to be smart about which schools I wanted to visit. After reaching out to several schools, I secured visits to USC, UNC Chapel Hill, SMU, ASU, and Notre Dame.
My trip to the University of Southern California was one of my favorites. I arrived on a Thursday night and stayed at the USC hotel on campus, rooming with another recruit. We decided to go get food somewhere close to campus with all the other recruits and then proceeded to all hang out at the hotel. The following day we met the coach and the team and they took us on a tour of the campus with an official tour guide. USC is one of the most beautiful campuses I have ever seen, and it is not too big, everything is walkable distance. While I was there, the campus was setting up for the induction of the new university president, so it was cool to see all the professors and university workers gathered together on campus prior to the ceremony. After our tour, we had a series of meetings with academic advisors, weight coach trainers, tutors, team coaches, and athletic counselors where we learned about all USC has to offer for their athletes. Next, we toured the pool and the weight room, which are both extremely nice facilities. After that we watched the swimming and diving team practice for a little before going to the bookstore to buy the USC merchandise we wanted and then had lunch on campus. That night we went to the USC vs. Utah football game and we got to go on the field before kickoff and take some really cool pictures. The Trojans ended up beating the Utes, so it was a good night at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The next day, the coach took us and the team to Manhattan Beach where we played a beach volleyball tournament and it was really great to be able to bond with the team. That night, we had a nice dinner at a restaurant in downtown LA, then went on to get a dessert from a well-known ice cream shop. After dinner and dessert, we all went back to one of the team members’ apartments to hang out and enjoy our last night. After I left the following morning, I knew that USC would definitely be one of my top choices.
Most official visits run the same way. You arrive, get situated in your housing, meet the coach and team, tour the campus, go to several meetings, and eat good food. I would always make sure to get the most out of my visits and learn as much as I could because I wanted to know what all each school had to offer before locking down on one. All in all, if I could, I would take more visits because they are extremely educational and a good time.
