About MLS.LINK

Before I became an educator, I was a storyteller

Most people know Lily through NCAA tennis recruiting. But my first career was as a stage director and one of China's earliest theater producers. What I actually did, every single time, was the same thing: find what's genuinely unique in a person, and help the right people see it.

Crossing into international education later felt less like a career change and more like an inevitable calling — what I did on stage, and what I do for every family now, are really the same craft: telling a young person's story to the right audience.

From 2012 to 2022 — a full decade — I led young people in Shanghai through youth theater training, international arts exchange, and early entrepreneurship programs. None of that decade was theoretical. Every program was built step by step with real kids.

What actually convinced me this path works is my own four children. They played three completely different sports — tennis, squash, and volleyball — yet all followed the same NCAA athletic recruiting pathway — and ended up at Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. This isn't theory. It happened in my own family, four times over.

That's exactly why, in 2022, I brought that conviction to the US and chose to focus on one thing: athletic recruiting. Not because it's easier — it's actually far more complex than pure academic admissions: you have to understand both how college admissions works and how each program's coaches actually recruit — miss either half, and a child can miss the window entirely. Most firms only understand one half. I had already tested both halves myself, four times over, before building a business around it.

In the five years since (2022–2026), an entire education ecosystem has grown around the "Lily Liu" IP — with partners drawn from stable, established education resources across China, the US, the UK, and Australia. It now spans US boarding school admissions, US undergraduate consulting, program development and matching, and daily support across 135 private communities — covering nearly every stage a US–China family encounters. Athletic recruiting remains our core focus — but what we're really building is a way for all of this scattered, world-class expertise to serve one goal: lifting every child toward their own future.

On this path through education, what's missing was never the method — it's someone willing to stay for the whole story, start to finish. That's what Lily and MLS.LINK have always been here to do.