My son(my baby!) is a freshman. My daughter is a junior. I'm actually excited to have him in high school. Just easier to have them in the same school.
He plays football, so it's also nice to have practices directly after school, instead of coming home after school, and going up to rec football practice from 5:45-8:30 every night. Much easier on the dinner schedule.
Playing football, they started practice in July, so he was comfortable at the school before he even started.
At BTS night, the gym teacher, who went to school with my husband, told us she does lunch duty in the gym, where my son eats lunch, and she said his tables are verrrry rowdy, but well behaved. Just a lot of energy. Whoops. I talked to him and told him he better keep the rowdy stuff to a minimum. My husband also went to school with the dean of discipline, and the principal was a few years ahead of him, as well.
There's only 1 lunch period here, so you don't get little groups of friends divided up into different lunch periods, there's like 30 of them who all sit together, even though in reality, my son tends to hang out with a smaller group of 8-10 boys.
I haven't even thought about SATs for him yet. They don't tend to take the ACT here.
My son is loud at home, while playing sports, and with his friends, and super shy all other times. I've told him, he's going to have to speak up in high school, discussions in class etc. so I really hope he steps up. That's my only concern as of now-he's in all honors courses, and is generally an excellent student, and happily, a self starter, so I expect him to do well.