| razordad, I have known a couple of football player athletes with similar SAT scores who got into highly selective LACs on the strength of their sport and they did just fine so I would not worry about a selective LAC being too hard for your son. If they accept him, they will also give him the support he needs to do the work.
With that said, I would think his amount of playing time would be very different at Clemson or USC than at Elon. One of our friend's sons started out playing for Colgate and realized that while he was a superstar in high school, he was a mere practice player at Colgate. When someone got hurt, they just moved the line down 10 feet and kept practicing, leaving the player unattended on the ground for the ambulance to come make its collection. He transferred to a small liberal arts college, with a weaker football team, and was a starter. So, the first question is whether or not your son wants to play in college and if so, would he rather be on the bench for a stronger team or on the field for a weaker team, or is he so good he could be on the field at the stronger team?
Your second, and perhaps primary concern, is whether he would get a better education at the LAC than the other schools. I would not assume this at all. I believe the football players in particular are well supported by tutors and supervised study halls so have the opportunity of very individualized instruction if the want/need it, particularly at the larger schools.
If your son goes to a larger school and decides he doesn't want to play or is cut from the team, he will be more on his own. But this also doesn't have to work against him. While the LAC may assume a certain proficiency with writing and go too fast (particularly without tutorial support), a school that assumes the students need more remedial work may be just the ticket for him to really make progress. Our son felt like he learned a lot more in his English for engineers class (which rightly assumed many of these students didn't love to write) than he had in any of his previous English classes.
In short, I would encourage him to pick the school that feels right for him and trust that he can learn in either environment if motivated. |