If your student is a freshman or sophomore right now, look around your neighborhood. Watch the senior families you know. The essay pressure. The 11 p.m. arguments about the activities list. The ED deadline countdown. That panic is not required. It is a symptom of starting too late, and early college planning is what quietly prevents it years before it would ever show up.
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Why starting in 9th or 10th grade changes everything
I want to tell you about Scott and Patti. Four years ago, they came to me with the same worry most parents have. They knew college mattered. They just did not know where to start.
So we started. Slowly. Methodically. No cramming. Their daughter Haley had time to actually explore, figure out what she cared about, and build a real story around it.
Four years later, Haley got into Northeastern, her dream school. And when I asked the family how the process felt, Patti said something that stopped me. She said, “It really wasn’t difficult at all.”
Read that again. A family went through the entire college admissions process and described it as not difficult. That is what time does.
The 90 percent nobody is paying attention
Here is the thing most families don’t realize. If your student is in 9th or 10th grade, you are already ahead of about 90 percent of families in your area just by paying attention right now. Most parents don’t start thinking about college until spring of junior year. By then, four semesters of GPA are already locked in and the activities story is largely written.
You have the one thing those families will not have. Time. And time is worth more in this process than any tutor, any summer program, or any last-minute essay push.
Starting early doesn’t mean doing more
Let me be clear on this because it gets misread constantly. Starting early does not mean adding another AP class, another club, or another SAT prep book to your 9th grader’s plate. It means the opposite. It means spreading the work out so it never feels heavy.
One class rigor decision in the fall of 10th grade. One activity commitment your student actually wants to make. One teacher relationship. Those small choices compound into a completely different senior year.
The six highest-leverage moves for freshman and sophomore families
When families ask me what to actually do in 9th and 10th grade, I don’t hand them a 50-page playbook. I give them six moves. These are the same low-hanging-fruit items I’ve identified after 16 years of coaching. Anyone can do them, and they matter more than any single test score.
1. Visit a few schools nearby
You do not need to fly to Boston. Pick three or four colleges within driving distance and walk the campuses. A big state university. A small liberal arts school. Maybe an urban campus like NYU if you’re near a city.
The goal is not to build the college list yet. The goal is to give your student some frame of reference so they can start figuring out what they like and what they don’t. That intuition takes years to develop. Start now, and by junior year building the actual list is fast.
2. Start a real relationship with the guidance counselor
Every high schooler has a guidance counselor. Most of them will meet that counselor for the first time senior year, when it’s time to ask for the letter of recommendation that goes to every school on the list.
Your counselor might have 40 students. They might have 400. Either way, the difference between a generic letter and a specific, powerful letter is whether they actually know your student. That starts sophomore year, not senior year.
3. Take the Saturday Morning Test
If your student had zero homework, zero obligations, and a completely free Saturday morning, what would they actually want to do? That question is the Saturday Morning Test, and it is the first place I send every family.
One of my former students loved fantasy football. Just loved it. We told him to lean in. Years later he had an entire blog with his own optimization algorithms for weekly lineups. That became his Showstopper Activity. If we had told him on day one, “build a math-driven fantasy football blog,” he would have quit in a week. We just said, start exploring. See where it goes.
4. Get a baseline SAT and ACT score, once
One low-stakes practice SAT and one practice ACT. That is it. The point is to figure out which test suits your student’s brain, so you can mentally block off the other one and stop wasting energy on both.
Most students end up strongly preferring one over the other. That single decision, made in 10th grade, saves 12 months of scattered effort.
5. Build two study habits that will change everything
Grades in the regular classes your student takes are the number one factor in college admissions. Not scores. Not activities. Grades. And the students I coach who have the highest GPAs are not the ones grinding the most hours. They are the ones with better systems.
Two habits. Airplane mode when studying. And 50-minute focused chunks. That’s it. If your 9th grader gets those two in place now, they are running a different race than everyone else for the rest of high school.
6. Sit down for ten minutes and talk about the future
This is the one I never did in high school, and I regret it. Ten minutes. Kitchen table. The only goal is to actually think about what your student might want to study in college.
Some students will still have no idea at the end of the ten minutes, and that is fine. But most will land on two or three areas that at least feel interesting. From there, you can start pointing activities, summer plans, and reading toward that direction. That is how a coherent story gets built, and colleges are looking for a coherent story.
The short version, if you want to print it on the fridge:
- Visit three to four colleges nearby
- Introduce your student to their guidance counselor this year
- Take the Saturday Morning Test and follow whatever surfaces
- One baseline SAT, one baseline ACT, pick a lane
- Airplane mode and 50-minute study chunks
- Ten minutes at the kitchen table about the future
What the head start actually looks like in practice
I have watched this pattern play out for 16 years, and the stories tend to sound the same. A family starts freshman or sophomore year. They do a few small things every semester. Then senior fall arrives and the whole thing is, quite honestly, not that hard.
Jack: Dartmouth admit, started sophomore year
Jack Beecher came to our program with a 66 percent on his college confidence score. For a student aiming at Ivy League caliber schools, that meant a lot of gaps. Because he started early, we had time to close every one of them. By the end, he was at 100 percent.
Jack got into Dartmouth and Vanderbilt. He’s in his sophomore summer at Dartmouth as I write this. When we sat down for an interview about what worked, the first thing he said was, “9th and 10th grade is a great time to get ahead of the game without having stress and achieve great success.”
Sen: Duke admit with a 1410 SAT
Sen came to us with an SAT score well below Duke’s middle 50 percent. Roughly 1410 to 1420. She started with us in freshman year and stayed with us for nearly four years. That runway gave her time to build the parts of her application that were not test scores. Story. Activities. Fit.
She just went off to Duke. That is what starting early does for a student whose scores alone would not have moved the needle.
What to actually do this semester
If your student is a freshman or sophomore reading this in September or October, here are the three moves that matter most for the next 90 days.
This month
Book one nearby college visit. It does not have to be a school your student would apply to. It just has to be a real campus you can walk. Weekends work. Fall break works. The point is to start building intuition.
Also, sit down for the ten-minute future conversation. Bring a notebook. No phones. Just talk.
This semester
Get your student in front of their guidance counselor once for a real conversation, even if it’s just five minutes about how classes are going. Introduce yourself as the parent if you can. Two conversations by winter break is the goal.
Have your student take one baseline SAT and one baseline ACT at home. Free ones. You do not need a course, a tutor, or a prep book yet. You just need the numbers.
Before the end of this year
Apply the B+ Rule to next year’s course selection. If your student can realistically get an A-minus in a harder class, take it. If they’re realistically looking at a B-minus, drop down a level. Colleges want to see rigor plus success, not rigor plus a slipping GPA.
And start the Saturday Morning Test conversation. Not as a one-time exercise. As an ongoing question through 10th grade. What surfaces will become the seed of your student’s story.
Frequently asked questions about early college planning
Is it really necessary to start college planning in 9th grade?
Necessary? No. Advantageous? Absolutely. Starting in 9th or 10th grade means small choices spread over years, instead of a panic sprint senior fall. Almost every family I know that started early describes senior year as calm rather than chaotic.
What if my student is already a junior? Are we too late?
You are not too late, but you have less runway. The same six moves still apply, you just have to compress them. Juniors should focus most on grades, testing strategy, and finding one activity to go deep on, in that order.
How much time should a freshman or sophomore actually spend on college planning per week?
Almost none as a separate activity. Everything I listed happens inside normal life. Kitchen table conversations, a Saturday campus visit, a five-minute check-in with a guidance counselor. If it feels like a second job, you are doing too much.
Should my 9th grader be doing SAT prep already?
No. Take one baseline SAT and one baseline ACT to see which fits their brain. Full test prep should start the summer before junior year for most students. Anything earlier tends to fade before it counts.
What if my student does not know what they are interested in yet?
That is completely normal at 14. The Saturday Morning Test is designed for exactly that. Your student does not need a passion. They need permission to explore, and enough time for something to actually surface.
How many activities should a freshman or sophomore be doing?
Fewer than you think. Less but better. Two or three activities your student genuinely cares about beats seven they signed up for because it looked good. Depth is what admissions officers remember. Breadth just fills a list.
The freshman year gift most families miss
The families who go through this process calmly are almost never the ones with the most resources or the smartest kids. They are the ones who started early enough to let time do the heavy lifting.
If your student is a freshman or sophomore right now, you have that gift. Use it. Six small moves this year. Six more next year. By senior fall you will be the family the neighbors ask for advice, not the family arguing at 11 p.m. about the activities list.
If you want help mapping out those small choices for your student, that is exactly what we do at CollegeConsulting.us. Apply for the 21-Day trial and we will talk through where your student is now and what the next 12 months should actually look like.
Ready to take the next step?
If your student is in 9th or 10th grade and you want a real plan for the next few years, this is exactly what we help families figure out. Apply for the 21-Day trial. We’ll talk through your student’s situation and map out the highest-leverage moves for the semester ahead. No pressure, just a real conversation.
And if you’re not quite ready for a call yet, start here. I put the six highest-leverage things freshman and sophomore families can do into a free guide. Grab The Freshman and Sophomore Head Start and walk through it with your student this weekend. It’s the same starting point I use with every new family in our program.
