<p>Hello – We started with a small pool of schools. My girls wanted girls only. After looking that felt too limiting so we opened it up to co-ed and then it was overwhelming. They decided to geographically limit to 1.5 hours from our house (aside from their 2 favorites who were outside that perimeter). The other thing they realized about themselves (they are similar to your daughter aside from the sports - they are very competitive) was that they wanted to “be known” at a school. That size mattered. They picked a rather arbitrary number of about how many kids in a grade felt right and we started from there. We did look at a couple of large (for them) schools just to test the theory and one felt like a college and I just couldn’t see them there and one made the list (and probably shouldn’t but they had a really great, artistic tour guide and she sold them on the school). So much depends on your tour you really have to separate out how you feel about “that kid” and what the school is in and of itself and that is hard. We had a legacy, slack off show us around one school and my girls are finding it really really hard to imagine that people who like to learn can go there too and flourish - thankfully, they met the senior, head of newspaper, type A girl that they related to at lunch and she ran them around to show us another side of the school too. Best of luck. We are almost done and I am so happy to let go of the stress (we need FA too - and it adds whole other element of stress because I know that they “could” get in anywhere but if they don’t get the aid we need, I can’t let them go. or worse they get turned down because the school can’t offer the aid and they feel like they didn’t make the cut, when really it was a FA thing.</p>