Isaac Olsen '25 Recruiting Profile

On my desk at home is a plaque with this quotation from Babe Ruth: “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” I keep this front and center as a reminder of my motivation in sports, academics, and extracurriculars.

My school is very small, with only 130 students from preschool to twelfth grade. In the years before my freshman year, our school activities started to fade away and our academics suffered as well. We had no football team, our basketball team had stopped winning, our speech team was made up of two students, music was marginalized, and our community started to lose interest in our school. As a freshman, I became one of the core students who committed to rebuilding all these sports and extracurricular programs, to strive for academic excellence, and to encourage our community’s renewed involvement in and support of our students. Rebuilding the extracurricular programs started with one basic step – I participated. Then I persuaded my fellow students into participating by talking about the opportunities these activities provided for us as students. Even as groups grew, someone had to step up whenever the coach or group leader needed a volunteer (even when no one else wanted to help), and that first and enthusiastic volunteer has usually been me. Slowly, slowly students have gotten more involved. Our football team is playing with the stands full on Friday nights; basketball fans make noise for our teams, win or lose (and we now win, even with only eight members last year and seven members this year); our speech team has grown from two students to thirteen (and a number of us have qualified for state contests); One Act is thriving; and our students (and our community) are taking pride in who we are and what we do. Our school academics are also on the upswing, and I have helped lead the way by asking for more opportunities to learn, whether taking accelerated math classes, signing up for dual credit courses with our local junior college, or simply being the student who always shows up with my work done on time. I am a straight-A student, President of the National Honor Society, and a member of the collegiate honor society, Phi Kappa Theta.

I have done all of this, and I do it all well. In sports, I was state ranked in basketball last year – 25^th in the state in rebounding per game, 107^th in the state in charges per game, and 77^th in the state for double-doubles. This year in football, I ranked 129^th in Nebraska for kickoff yards. I am the team captain for both basketball and football and am a varsity starter for both teams. 

I believe that, if you asked my teachers, my coaches, our community members, and my peers, they would give me labels like “good kid”, “smart”, “disciplined”, and “involved”, but I also believe they would tell you that they can depend on me, that I will always “get it done,” and that I am willing to take responsibility for my school, my team, and my community.  I will take that same attitude to college and will commit with the same intensity in the university setting that I have learned and practiced in my high school.  After all, you cannot “beat a person who never gives up.”