**Update as of 6/8/18, Jamir has graduated high school and chosen Notre Dame as his college**
North Carolina native Jahmir Smith is bringing a whole new meaning to the term "student-athlete."
In the classroom, Jahmir, an honor student at Lee County High School in Sanford, North Carolina, has earned an impressive 4.43 GPA (wow!) and enough credits to graduate high school early. This past football season, Smith was an N&O All-Metro football pick after rushing for 2,130 yards (6.7 per carry) and a state-leading 41 touchdowns for the 12-2 Yellow Jackets. All of which landed him in the record books of the North Carolina High School Athletic Association.
Colleges from across the nation have taken notice - 33 to be exact. As of now, Jahmir has received over 33 academic and athletic scholarship offers. That is including all eight Ivy League schools! Mind you, he hasn't even started his senior year of high school yet.
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When Smith received his first Ivy League offer, he immediately called his mom.
Monique McLean, a nurse at UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill, was driving to work when she got the call from her second eldest son.
Princeton wanted Smith to attend school and play college football there.
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“I almost wrecked my truck, I was that excited,” McLean said.
But while she was excited, she knew it was only a matter of time before he’d receive offers from the seven other Ivy League schools. Smith, who scored a 25 on his ACT, has always been smart. He took a liking to academics at a very young age, she told the News Observer.
Over the next two months, one-by-one the offers came in. First it was Brown, then Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Pennsylvania – and finally Columbia.
“I know my baby. He’s going to be a doctor, and he’s going to the NFL,” McLean said with a huge smile on her face. “I just know it.”
She thinks he’ll be someone like a star safety at Florida State and Rhodes Scholar who studied at Oxford University, was drafted in the sixth round of the 2010 NFL draft by the Tennessee Titans. He left the NFL in 2013 to attend the Florida State University College of Medicine to study to be a neurosurgeon. He will begin a residency at Harvard this summer.
“That’s Myron Rolle Jr. right there,” McLean said pointing to her son, who thinks he wants to be an anesthesiologist one day.
McLean is proud of her son and is his number one cheerleader. At high school football games,...
... Smith can always hear his mom in the stands. When he looks up, she’s wearing a shirt with his number, 3, on it.
Each time he gets an offer from a school, she gets excited too. That’s what she’s most proud of.
But Smith is almost the opposite. He doesn’t show much emotion. When he scores a touchdown, he immediately hands the ball to the referee. And when he gets mail from a school, he places it in a box with the other offers he’s received.
“I mean my mom tells me how rare it is, but I mean, it’s whatever to me,” Smith said of the Ivy League offers. “I mean I know it’s big deal, but I don’t brag about it.
“I feel like I still got more to do.”
Well, if he has more work to do, then whew I'd better get to work too! Congratulations Jahmir! Keep pushing for the moon...you'll reach it!
