For parents of 8th–10th graders · Free 1:1 Student Feedback Session · 30 min
The Runway Map

For parents of 8th to 10th graders · the earlier you see the roadmap, the more options you can build

Your student has more college options today
than they may have two years from now.

See where my student standsFree 30-minute 1:1 Student Feedback Session with Coach Randy

The question is what you do with the time you still have. Course choices, grades, testing, activities, leadership, identity, college positioning and financial planning — most families work on these separately. The Runway Map connects them into one grade-by-grade strategy, so your family knows what matters now, what comes next, and what you do not want to discover too late.

  • Your Runway Snapshot. Where your student is now, what is coming next, where gaps may exist, and the top three moves right now — on a 30-minute Google Meet with Coach Randy.
  • The two clocks your family is planning against. The student clock — courses, grades, testing, activities, leadership, positioning. And the family clock — college costs, financial-aid preparation, college selection, aid applications, funding decisions. Nobody shows families how the two interact.
  • Senior year should be execution, not discovery. What is worth doing in the grades your student actually has left, so the last year is spent applying rather than finding out.

Map the years your student has left

A free 1:1 Student Feedback Session on Google Meet, 30 minutes. If your family needs a complete multi-year roadmap and help executing it, Coach Randy will explain what that could look like through AthletIQ Connect.

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Your details first, so we can hold the slot. Three quick questions next.

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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.

Tutoring can improve a subject. Test prep can improve a score. College counselling can help with applications. What AthletIQ Connect does is connect the student’s academics, identity, positioning, college strategy and financial strategy into one system. The pieces matter; the advantage comes from connecting them.

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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.

8th–10th

A powerful window for building the foundation, before application deadlines start driving the calendar.

Depth >
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Colleges can evaluate how students spend their time, what they care about and what impact comes from it. Meaningful commitment takes time to build, which is why starting earlier creates more room.

90 days

Your Runway Snapshot ends with three priorities your family can begin now.

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.

Students walking across a university campus in autumn
The end of the plan. It is decided in years your student is living through right now.

What we will uncover in 30 minutes

Four things, in half an hour, one to one.

You will leave with
Your Runway Snapshot

Why the sessions are limited.

Coach Randy personally reviews the information for each family before you meet, so the number of Student Feedback Sessions is limited each week. If this week is full, you will be offered the next opening.

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.

Map my student's years

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. This is a working session. Coach Randy’s goal is to understand your student, help your family see the next right moves, and determine whether additional guidance would be valuable. If AthletIQ Connect is a fit, he will explain how the program works. Either way you will leave with greater clarity.

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 rigor, testing timeline, the financial-aid timeline, and the activities that need time to build.

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.

Map my student's years