For parents of 8th–10th graders · Free 1:1 Student Feedback Session · 30 min
The Runway Map
The years nobody tells you are already counting
By the time they apply, most of it is already decided.
Course choices in ninth grade set what is possible in twelfth. The tax year that decides your first aid package closes two years before your student starts. Almost every family begins planning in the one year when the fewest things can still be changed.
What you get: a year-by-year plan for your student — built for the grades they actually have left, on a 30-minute Google Meet with Coach Randy.
What each year is for, academically and financially. Written out, it becomes obvious which year you are currently spending on the wrong things.
What closes, and when. Course sequences, the base tax year, testing windows, the activities that need three years to mean anything. Deadlines nobody sends you a letter about.
Grades and test scores matter. They are not what decides it.
Identity, visibility, positioning and strategy decide it — who your
student is on paper, which colleges can actually see them, where they land in
a pool, and whether any of it was planned. That is the part almost nobody
works on, and it is the part that moves both the acceptance and the price.
It is also the honest reason to work with Coach Randy rather than another
tutor: a tutor raises a score. This changes where that score is worth the
most.
Stand OutGet InPay Less
Why the timing decides it
Two calendars run at once and most families only ever see one. There is the school calendar — courses, tests, activities — and underneath it a financial one, where the tax year that prices your family closes long before anyone applies anywhere. Families who start in senior year are not lazy. They were simply never told the second calendar existed.
6th–12th
The grades a college plan actually covers. Most families start it in the last one.
2 years
How far ahead the tax year sits that decides your first aid package. It closes while they are still in high school.
3 years
Roughly how long an activity needs to run before an admissions reader treats it as commitment rather than decoration.
What you leave the call with
A plan for the years your student actually has left, not a checklist written for somebody else's child.
Where they stand
Grade, courses, GPA trajectory, and what that already implies about the range of colleges in play.
Year by year
What each remaining grade is for. On paper, so you can see which one is currently being wasted.
The course sequence
Which choices this year quietly decide what is available in eleventh and twelfth. This is the one that surprises parents most.
The money calendar
When your base tax year closes and what is worth doing before it.
Testing and positioning
When to sit tests, and what actually distinguishes an application from the thousands beside it.
The next ninety days
Three things to do now, ranked. A plan you cannot start this week is a document, not a plan.
The end of the plan. It is decided in years your student is living through right now.
The Runway Map — everything included
What a family
normally pays for each piece, and what this costs.
A year-by-year plan for the grades your student actually has left$250
Both calendars mapped together — academic and financial$100
What is already closing, and how long you have before it does$100
A written summary you can put on the fridge$50
Plus: the recording of the monthly planning workshop$150
What you pay
$650Free
A plan for your student, or I owe you.
You should come off this call with the years written out and the next ninety days decided. If you do not, tell me and I will build it by hand and email it to you — and you will never hear from me again.
Built one student at a time, around Randy's own coaching. Four a week.
Who this is for
Said plainly, because thirty minutes with the wrong family helps nobody.
This is for you if
Your student is in 8th, 9th or 10th grade
You would rather be early than accurate about being late
Nobody has ever laid the years out for you in order
You want to know which decisions are already closing
This is not for you if
Your student is a senior — go to the Offer Autopsy page instead, which reads the offers you already have
Your student is in 7th grade or younger — the workshop is yours for now, and the call is worth booking the year they reach 8th
You want somebody else to run your student's schedule for them
You want somebody to write the essays or fill in the forms for you
You want a guarantee about one particular college, which nobody can honestly give
The years do not come back
Every grade that passes without a plan is a grade of options quietly closing. Thirty minutes puts the remaining ones in order.
Coach Randy, on what the session actually covers. Two minutes.
Who is running it
Coach Randy Narciso
Coach Randy Narciso is the founder of AthletIQ Connect and the creator of College Pathway Intelligence. A USC engineering graduate with a USC MBA, he spent thirty years in business leadership, technology and strategy before turning the same systems thinking on college admissions. Fifteen years guiding students into universities across the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia, and a father who has been through admissions, financial aid and funding himself. He does not teach theory; he teaches what he has lived. He is a college planner, not a financial adviser, and he sells no financial products.
No cost, no card, nothing to cancel. Why is it free? Because roughly one family in ten asks to work with him afterwards and the other nine tell somebody. That is the whole business model, and it only works if the thirty minutes is genuinely useful to the nine. Nothing is sold on the call — he explains the ongoing work once at the end, and it is not cheap, which is exactly why he would rather you found that out after the free part than before it.
What families say
“I’ve worked with Coach Randy since I was 7 years old, and the biggest thing he helped me build was a mindset around discipline, consistency, and always being prepared. Through sports and extracurriculars, I learned how to lead, manage my time, and take ownership of my development on and off the court. Coach Randy didn’t just…”
Double Major at Cal Lutheran
“I started working with Coach Randy when I was just 8 years old, and from the beginning the focus wasn’t just music—it was discipline, academics, and building habits that would last. Coach Randy helped me understand how to balance creativity with structure, and how to take school seriously while pursuing my passion. By the…”
Music Major, Loyola Marymount University
“Working with Coach Randy helped me learn early how to balance academics, sports, and leadership without feeling overwhelmed. Being involved in basketball and multiple clubs, I learned how to stay organized, disciplined, and confident in the classroom while still competing at a high level. Coach Randy taught me how to build…”
8th Grader at Heritage Christian School
Questions parents ask
We are in 6th or 7th grade. Can we book?
Not yet, and the form will tell you so rather than take the booking and waste your morning. Two things are worth getting right this early — the maths sequence that starts in middle school, and how you save — and both are covered in the workshop recording you will be sent instead. Book the call the year your student reaches 8th grade.
We are in tenth grade. Is it too late to matter?
No. Tenth is the last year where most of the levers are still genuinely open — course rigour, testing timeline, the base tax year, and the activities that need time to mean anything.
Does the plan assume a particular kind of college?
No, and it deliberately does not narrow the list this early. The point of the map is to keep options open long enough for your student to choose, rather than have the choices quietly close on them.
Our grades are strong. Isn't that enough?
It is what almost every family assumes, and it is where most of them lose. Thousands of students have the grades, the scores and the activities. Highly qualified students are turned down every year, not for lack of intelligence, but because nothing in the application says who they are, how they lead, or why a college should remember them. The work is to be unforgettable, not merely qualified — and that is built over years, not written in an essay in December.
We feel like we are already behind. Are we?
Probably not as far as it feels, and that is worth thirty minutes to find out rather than to keep wondering. Most families arrive saying some version of we do not know where to start, we do not know what to do next, or we should have begun sooner. The call answers those three for your student specifically. If it turns out there is genuinely nothing to do yet, you will be told that too.
Is Coach Randy a financial adviser?
No, and he will tell you so on the call. He is a college planner. He works out what colleges will charge your family and where the money comes from. He does not sell insurance, investments or savings plans, and he takes no commission from anybody.
Do you need my tax return?
No. Bring rough numbers — household income, roughly what you have in savings and investments outside retirement accounts, and your state. That is enough to get within a few hundred dollars, and nothing you say is stored.
Does my student need to be on the call?
It works better if they are, especially from tenth grade up — the decisions are theirs to live with. But a parent alone is fine, and plenty of these are booked by one parent who then plays it back to the other.
Senior year is paperwork, or it is panic
Which one it turns out to be is decided years earlier, by families who knew what each year was for. That is the entire difference.
