This is flat out impossible for many families.
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“Minimize debt and eliminate it altogether if possible” would indeed have been better wording.
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OP: Are you familiar with honors colleges at large state universities ? Many are designed to give one the advantages of both a small, intimate college experience combined with the benefits of the resources of a large university. Many state university honors colleges offer substantial merit scholarship money.
Check out the Honors College at the University of South Carolina, the University of Alabama Honors College, the University of Mississippi Honors College (you probably could attend for free as you would be awarded multiple merit scholarships including one for Girl Scout Gold status), College of Charleston Honors, Furman University in South Carolina might be of interest to you.
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I strongly agree, with a big caveat. There’s massive variation among honors colleges. At my son’s school for example (Cal Poly), it made no sense. Classes are already small and all professor taught. The only advantage there is early registration, which is a big advantage, but he was a year ahead, so registered early anyway. He elected not to join when invited because it would have added 10 unrelated hours to his curriculum. Ditto Utah, except classes are not small and discussions and labs are TA taught. It also added 10 hours. The big advantage there is the Marriott dorm…unparalleled at any university we visited, and we visited a lot! 
The perfect representation is Oregon State. Their honors classes replace curriculum required classes and go into fairly advanced levels. Teachers compete to be chosen for those classes. They are small. Essentially it’s the Cal Poly experience at Oregon State (with rain instead of the ocean 
).
I hear Barrett at ASU is quite good, but don’t have first hand experience.
Stuart Nachbar at Educated Quest has a nice article on the pros and cons of honors colleges. https://educatedquest.com/the-upside-and-downside-of-public-honors-colleges/
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Since you’ve visited schools in Iowa I’d assume you’ve looked at Grinnell. If you have your heart set on not taking the public option, that may be the best (or close to) fit for what you’re looking for. Obviously, you should contact the coach to figure out athletics, but I’d say that Grinnell has strong academics (biased to an extent bc current student) and pretty regularly gives out merit aid at around 20K+ a year to domestic students. I don’t know any pre-dental students, but the bio program is great and the pre-meds I know are pretty happy. I also personally think the student-athlete experience has been great. With your stats, I’d say you would have a strong shot at ED, but that is a financial gamble (though if you’re recruited, the coach will likely encourage ED). With RD, I’d recommend demonstrating lots of interest in the school to maximize chances of acceptance.
Perhaps not a top choice if you’d like to leave your hometown, but applying to Macalester EA would probably give you an early acceptance with some merit.
As far as I know, Grinnell and then Mac seem to be the highest ranking schools to frequently give large merit aid and meet your other qualifications. I believe Kenyon gives it out fairly often, but many of their sports teams are incredibly competitive (no idea about tennis). Oberlin also gives it out, but in lesser amounts (website says 10K guaranteed).
East coast will have very few competitive schools with merit aid. Most campuses out East seem to follow a pretty bimodal distribution of wealth (most are very wealthy or very poor, and then a few in the middle). At least that was the impression I got while visiting.
Best of luck!
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The problem with any of these options is that their sticker prices are now so high that even with fairly large aid packages they can still be over $200,000. Grinnell, WITH $80,000 in aid will still be $212,000. Truman on the other hand is $100,000 and that’s BEFORE the automatic $8000/year reduction for the OP’s GPA and ACT. That’s not an insignificant difference. Truman is not a big school either. They have less than 5000 students.
There are LOTS of schools that would serve the OP well. The question is how do they fit in context with the hundreds of thousands of dollars still waiting for her after?
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Merit awards at Oberlin go up to low 30s/year. Grinnell, last time I checked, maxed out at 25K/year and Macalester was 20K/year (might have gone up, but not more than Oberlin’s max).
Other schools mentioned up thread offer more than 30K/year and up to full tuition: Wooster, Denison, Centre, Rhodes, Muhlenberg, St. Olaf, Beloit, St. Lawrence are among them, although the last three feature long, cold winters! Denison is increasingly competitive for the big awards.
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My D is pre-med, not pre-dental, but I assume the pre-health tracks are similar. For that reason we were seeking merit to save on undergrad, as many others have encouraged up thread. She applied to a mix of schools that “frequently” give merit and some reaches with competitive merit (mostly LACs since that was her preference). All the schools she applied to have been mentioned up thread, and she was quite successful with the schools that frequently award merit and also got a couple of competitive merit scholarships. The schools that offered merit (excluding the competitive scholarships) lowered the COA to a range of $22k (Furman) - $41k (Case).
One of the ways she narrowed down her initial application list was to request calls with the pre-health advisor at the schools she was considering. She asked questions about not only the advising but also the resources for volunteering/internship/shadowing opportunities. This helped her weed out a few schools.
Much like your mom told you, I encouraged her to dig into the campus culture to find a place she would be able to maintain a healthy social life and participate in extracurriculars she enjoys. If she does continue to medical school, that social life will go away! She also considered any reputation for grade deflation or hyper-competitive environment as GPA is important for med school applications.
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I’m being persnickety here, but no school deflates grades. Plenty of them inflate them though. The net effect is the same though. 
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I guess I’ll take your word for it! 
I have no proof, although there are posts on CC that disagree. Regardless, note I said “reputation”, which at the least implies a more rigorous/competitive academic environment.
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Great idea! I will reach out to each universities advisors.
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I’d probably avoid both of these. They are dramatically different in practice though. Schools like Cal Poly, Purdue and Harvey Mudd are all known for hard grading, at least in engineering, but are very cooperative environments.
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