I work with some of Van Kekerix’s family, can confirm. From what I’m told he wants to farm right away.
There’s actually a lot of that around this area. Central Lyon had a kid who got recruited to wrestle at Iowa and also had D-1 offers for football. Stayed home to farm.
There’s two NAIA schools up here within like 15 miles of each other, and that’s what a ton of guys end up doing because they don’t want to leave the area. Dordt is one of them, and they have a pretty strong ag program. Northwestern College is the other one.
The other factor is the very, very high proportion of the population here that are Dutch Reformed. Northwestern is an RCA school, and Dordt is CRC. They are separate denominations of the same Reformed faction and a LOT of farm or rural kids go there to play sports. With that name he’s definitely a CR.
To be brutally honest, farming in a lot of cases up here pays better than the average NFL career if you were to even make it that far. If you own 80 acres of ground in NW Iowa (which is a really really small farm anymore) you’re a multimillionaire before anything else you own is valued.