WAYLAND – Max Dresens stands 6-foot-1 and tips the scales at 210 pounds. He looks like a football player, and a big-time one at that.
Yet when the Wayland senior went about choosing a college, playing football and the level of that football weighed less than the school side. Dresens wants to study mechanical engineering and needed that program to fit before the football one.
“I was looking more at the educational side of it,” he said. “Gotta make mom happy.”
His mother, Gretchen, has so far gotten it all with her sons’ college decisions. Max’s oldest brother Zack played soccer at Tufts, while another brother Nick is a senior linebacker on the Jumbos football team, following in their father Paul’s footsteps. Jackson Dresens is a sophomore forward on the Saint Anselm soccer team after he took a postgrad year at Bridgton Academy.
Max’s recruitment took off this summer after his breakout junior season. He missed his sophomore year with a shoulder injury then burst onto the scene with a single-season school record with 1,762 rushing yards and 24 total touchdowns last year. Dresens considered high academic programs at all levels before finding his place at Bucknell.
“The education took No. 1 priority,” he said. “It wasn’t a D1 thing. The fact that I was able to play at a school that was that good academically with also being a Division 1 football program, I’m very lucky to land that.”
Obviously it took more than luck. Dresens spent much of the spring and summer crisscrossing the Northeast at football camps. He was the Dual County League MVP a season ago but knew that wouldn’t guarantee anything at the college level.
“I understand how hard that is coming out of a Division 4 public school in Massachusetts, right? It’s hard to do it,” Dresens said. “I had confidence in myself. I know how hard I work. I was confident myself. I knew if I worked hard enough, I could make it happen.”
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He visited Bucknell in April and attended a camp at the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, campus in July. Dresens also held an offer from renowned engineering school (and Division III football program) RPI. He took visits to Villanova and Brown. More offers would likely have materialized if Dresens waited. Instead, he found his place at Bucknell and committed in August.
That allowed him to turn his attention fully on his senior season at Wayland. He has already run for 220 yards and four touchdowns in two games on just 27 carries. Dresens also caught a touchdown pass against Ashland and has been a fearsome linebacker.
“He doesn’t talk. He plays with his pads, you know. People feed off of that,” Wayland coach Scott Parseghian said. “It’s kind of fun to watch him punish people on both sides of the ball.”
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He’ll have to enjoy his carries and touchdowns while he can. Dresens will play linebacker exclusively for the Bison, which he called “kind of funny” given the gaudy offensive numbers he produces. But that’s next year. Locking in his commitment and academic future has left Dresens with a singular focus.
“All in on Wayland,” he said.
Contact Kyle Grabowski at kgrabowski@gannett.com. Follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @kylegrbwsk.
This article originally appeared on MetroWest Daily News: Wayland’s Max Dresens chose Bucknell for academics as much as football
