<p>I’m sure you are aware of ND’s terrific admission rate at med schools: 80%</p>
<p>How do his other choices compare?</p>
<p>TutuTaxi #100</p>
<p>Ross Lane, one of the wide receivers on Northwestern’s football team, is from B’s high school. B really admires him. </p>
<p>My husband is enamored of Northwestern’s med program; thinks it would be perfect for B. So far, B has not expressed a great deal of interest in the school. </p>
<p>I am taking at least 3 weeks off before tax season starts up to help B get the rest of his apps out and attempt to persuade him to apply to some other schools as well. He’s started lacrosse and is playing in some tournaments over the holidays, so he’s not going to be easy to pin down for some long heart-to-hearts and massive app-completion sessions. </p>
<p>Thank God his sister will be home for Christmas. She can - and will - crack the whip on him also!</p>
<p>What about Williams? It’s a wonderful place for scholar-athletes with character, like your son.</p>
<p>Grace, I have never heard of Williams. Can you tell me a bit about it?</p>
<p>Brandon’s mom, your s and my s sound alot alike. My s has played football since he was 7. He has been a 3 year starter (2 years fullback, 1 year inside linebacker) on his football team (Texas 5A). Last year, he seriously considered continuing on with football in college. Due to his size - 5’10" 215, he is too small for D1 (those people are truly freaks of nature!!). He and my husband visited a couple of D3 schools, Rhodes and Trinity, and he was looking into some others. During this sr season, he started to be actively recruited by a number of small schools and he had to do some deep soul searching. He has a really good friend who is a walk on at a D1 school, so explored that option as well. He eventually decided to hang up his cleats. And boy, has it been a hard decision. He decided to attend UT and just play intermurals and work on his golf game. For someone who hasn’t had a Fall in 11 years without putting on pads and a helmet to just have it end is just really heartbreaking. Honestly, I can barely look at a picture of him in his uniform without tearing up. </p>
<p>For us, his last game was in the state playoffs (made it to Area finals), Thanksgiving weekend, at Reliant Stadium, where the Texans play. It was amazing! Our side of the stadium was full (bottom tier) of screaming fans. The score ended 34-33 due to a missed extra point at the end of the 4th quarter. It doesn’t get much better (or worse depending on your viewpoint) than that. </p>
<p>Oh well, all good things must come to an end. And for our boys, they are on to the next chapter in their life, an exciting one at that. I don’t know who will mourn the end of football more, him or me!! :(</p>
<p>Brandon’s mom, weird, I’m telling you our kids are alike - my s plays lacrosse too and starts practicing this week…</p>
<p>Like I said, on to the next chapter. But, lacrosse is a poor sub for football, it’s allways been just what you do during spring to stay in shape for fall ;)</p>
<p>ag54 what a wonderful story about the playoffs Now having had the experience of last night, I can relate! </p>
<p>Your son sounds like a great kid. 11 years of football - WOW! He will miss it as much as you will, no matter what he does.</p>
<p>I would love to put this thread in a time capsule so that 20 years from now people could see what an internet chat room was like. Over 100 emails about whether this terrible injustice goes unpunished.
Those lucky Sudanese refugees. They thought they had problems. Thank god they havent had to suffer something as tragic as missing out on some local high school all star game award. Poor Brandon, poor Brandon’s mom, poor Brandon’s grandfather, poor sick orphan child that Brandon promised the game ball if he won the student award.</p>
<p>I know this post will be met with outrage but seriously is this oversight of Brandon worthy of this kind of discussion? And, by the way, if your son lost a French award in 8th grade and it happened more then a day ago get over it.</p>
<p>No one is saying that Brandon’s situation rises to the level of tragedy. It does not mean that it is not worth discussing on a forum devoted to education.</p>
<p>br2001. </p>
<p>Most of the posts have been extraordinarily positive. </p>
<p>I very much appreciate the input from most of the posters. They provided an avenue for me to bounce thoughts off of how to handle this correctly. And they also gave out some additional college ideas for B, which I did not expect. People have been very helpful, and I thank them.</p>
<p>Wow, harsh br2001. </p>
<p>It is a CHAT BOARD! There are also threads about what kinds of sheets to buy and other many inconsequential topics! If you are looking for a chat board about Sudanese orphans, Google it, I am sure you will find one. But, in the meantime, go away. As you can see, we enjoy each other’s comments, and if it’s good for us, so be it!</p>
<p>RE: post #108 - Yes! This thread should be put in a time capsule so people 20 years from now could see what an internet chat room was like - diverse people from all over the world getting together, asking questions, supporting, consoling, and cheering each other…it is a lovely thing to behold…and it is this very warm human quality that needs to be cherished any time people reach out to one another and connect…it is the disconnect of one group of human towards another that create the cruelty taking place in the Sudan, IMHO.</p>
<p>Brandon’s Mom:</p>
<p>Your son sounds like a great kid and a fine player, and the UAA is a fine DIII league. But I don’t think that his football ability is going to help him much at Harvard or Duke. As far as the admissions process goes, athletes come in two categories: recruited and not recruited. With respect to DI schools, you son seems to be in the latter category. (Well, there’s also preferred walk-ons, but that doesn’t apply here either)</p>
<p>Nicely put BHappyMom!</p>
<p>Duke football?</p>
<p>Come on EMM1, I think Duke needs players like Brandon. The Duke football team this year was noted as the worst athletic team in 25 years in the NCAA (or something like that). Not only is he a good player, but he is smart. He could possibly bring up the average GPA of the team. :)</p>
<p>No doubt Brandon would pull up the GPA of any team at any school. But I thought Duke was known for keeping their admission standards high for their athletes. Am I wrong?</p>
<p>oh yeah SS, I forgot…</p>
<p>( My S tutored some football players his freshman year…)</p>
<p>I’m not the world’s biggest expert on football recruiting at elite colleges. But I certainly have the impression that a 6’2", 225-lb offensive lineman who is good enough to make the All-Star team in a competitive school district in west Florida, and who is a top student, would be very attractive to any Ivy League school or top LAC with a football team. That’s the kind of players they have. It’s a lot of fun to be an Ivy League football star, and a lot less work than it would be at a normal D1 program. Also perhaps a little less lonely to be a good student who plays football there. The football culture isn’t as overwhelming as at Notre Dame, but it’s still a big deal.</p>
<p>But those coaches do not have national networks of scouts to do their recruiting. For the most part, interested players contact them, and then the coach looks at stats and tapes and decides whether to start recruiting. But it’s pretty late in the season to be thinking about this. If Brandon has an interest, he should start dialing right away.</p>
<p>Williams, by the way, is great, too. One of the very tippy-top academic elite LACs, about 500 students/class, beautiful (isolated) campus in the Berkshire mountains in western Massachusetts. Mini’s alma mater, and the source of some of his lurid drinking statistics. It cares about having a good football team.</p>
<p>[Not that I don’t understand the appeal of Notre Dame. I have a shaggy dog story about the Notre Dame - Ivy tradeoff: </p>
<p>A friend of mine from my midwestern city was a woman who actually was registered at Notre Dame when it was still virtually all-male – women were admitted to the engineering program because St. Mary’s had no engineering courses at all. One Christmas vacation during college, she was in the bar in our town which was the big hang-out for ex-Catholic high school jocks, and a really nice, good-looking boy started chatting her up. Everything was great, except he was telling her that he went to Notre Dame, and she knew that if there were some boy from our city that cute at Notre Dame she would know who he was. (Of course, it didn’t occur to him that she went to Notre Dame, because it was all-male, and 99% of the women in the bar went to the local state college or state university.) So she kept asking him questions about Notre Dame until she had him completely tangled and trapped, and finally let him know that she knew he was lying. </p>
<p>Was he really in college? Yes. Where? Yale. Not only was he really in college at Yale, he was really the starting quarterback of the Ivy-champion Yale football team. And a premed molecular biology major. (This was true, he didn’t lie twice.) Of course, my friend was impressed. But there was no question that, if you wanted to pick up girls in this bar, and didn’t happen to stumble on the really smart one, it was higher status to be just any student at Notre Dame than to be the quarterback at Yale.]</p>
<p>First, I wasn’t making a comment on Brandon’s Mom’s son’s ability. I’m not an expert in football and, in any event, haven’t seen him play. My point was that the admissions office isn’t in the business of evaluating football talent; the coach is. If the coach hasn’t recruited a kid, he is not going to help in the admissions process.</p>
<p>But beyond that, the idea of a 225 pound offensive lineman competing in the Ivy League (let alone the ACC) is absurd. I actually know a boy who was recruited as an offensive lineman, primarily at the Lehigh/Penn level. 300 pounds.</p>
<p>As I said, sounds like a great kid who will get into Notre Dame anyway.</p>
<p>In our experience with our s and with others on his team, sometimes initial contact is made by the athlete, others, come from out of the blue - you get a phone call or letter. Examples: My s contacted one school he was interested in during his junior year, they requested tape, he was then invited for a visit. Another got his name from an alumni player and they contacted him and asked for tape. He has gotten calls/letters from a number of other schools. In some cases, recruiters had visited practice and gotten his name, along with others, from the coach. The coach then calls the kids into his office and gives them the letters. So far, only 3 kids have gotten official offers from D1 schools, but there are a couple other seniors who are waiting on pins and needles. A few others are weighing their options with D3 programs. Frankly, after visiting two D3 programs, I think what turned my s off was the fact that the programs themselves were smaller than his hs program. I think he kind of felt like he has had his day and it is time to move on instead of trying to keep it going with something that could be less (I don’t know how to put it)… than what he has experienced. There is alot of hoopla surrounding Texas 5A football and to go and play where there are fewer people in the stands than a hs game is kind of a let down, if you know what I mean.</p>
<p>Right now, I think the kids are getting attention because we have a D1 quality quarterback (junior this year, but will probably be one of the top national qb recruits next year) so alot of recruiters have been coming to practices and games. That helps! And BTW, for those who think football players like him are dummies-he is tied for valedictorian and his father was a Rhodes Scholar who also happened to be a pro quarterback back in the 70’s. No dumb genes there!</p>