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LOOKS LIKE RECRUITING MIGHT FINALLY GO BACK TO SEPT OF JUNIOR YEAR!

College Coaches Lobby to Stem Early Recruiting
by Justin Feil | LaxMagazine.com | Twitter
Lea Cox can't help but feel at least a little pressure to select a college.
"I'm the last girl on my team to pick a school," she said.
Cox, a junior at girls' lacrosse powerhouse St. Stephen's & St. Agnes School in Alexandria, Va., drew little interest from NCAA Division I last year. She played, but never at full strength after coming back from a stress fracture that cost her the fall of her sophomore year, then a torn meniscus that cut short most of her ensuing spring. Meanwhile, her high school and club teammates from Capital Lacrosse Club were getting offers and making verbal commitments to colleges.
As Cox searches now, she hears from many colleges that they have filled their Class of 2017 commitments.
"There are points when you think there's nothing ahead and you're really upset with yourself," Cox said. "When you're playing you think, this is your last chance."
Cox wouldn't feel as behind if two proposals submitted recently by the IWLCA for Division I coaches would gain NCAA approval. The first amends the recruiting calendar, while the second would prohibit any contact with prospective student-athletes until Sept. 1 of their junior year. If passed — no sure thing given the NCAA's move toward deregulation and a history of ignoring similar sport-specific proposals — they would mean that future high school juniors would all be in the same boat as Cox, whittling down their final college choices as September closes.
"If they did wait to do that, I'd have the same chance as everyone else," Cox said. "And I'd have a bigger pool of schools."
Coaches want the changes because they would help better match players to their schools, not just their teams, and pushing younger and younger players into making college choices is limiting that potential.
"None of us feel super comfortable evaluating 14-year-olds and projecting where they'll be seven years down the road," said Duke head coach Kerstin Kimel, co-chair of the Recruiting Issues Committee. "I have a freshman daughter [in high school]. She's been in this environment, been around a college and a college team, and she doesn't know what she wants. It's a hard choice. We're asking them to do it with an immature perspective on life."
"You want kids and families old enough and able to consider what they want and are looking for in a college experience," Kimel added. "And when they visit, they're able to absorb all that knowledge and weigh that with what they're looking for and not looking for. It's going to result in kids making much better decisions."
More than anything, the IWLCA's proposed legislation would give everyone more time. Coaches will have more time to focus on their current teams, while student-athletes will have more time to select the school that best fits.
"The accelerated process is too accelerated," said Julie Myers, head coach of Virginia and chair of the Lacrosse Rules Committee, which operates separately from the Recruiting Issues Committee. "We all can agree it's crazy. There's nothing urgent for a ninth-grader except getting ready for the next day of school."

The IWLCA's proposed recruiting amendments would put greater emphasis on high school lacrosse. (Greg Shemitz)
Leigh Ernst Friestedt, founder and president of Equity IX, which focuses on women's sports, presented material from her documentary, "Early Recruit: The 'Committed' Student-Athlete," at last year's IWLCA convention. She traced the development of the early recruiting process and outlined the issues with prospects verbally committing to schools earlier and earlier after researching and interviewing top players from programs like St. Stephen's and St. Agnes.
"Every graduating high school senior will tell me that she absolutely wanted to make that decision on her own, and they wanted that to be their decision," Friestedt said. "They recognize they're not in a positon to make the decision on their own and likely need their parents. Their decision could likely be different from what it would be if they were an older junior or senior student-athlete."
Cox does see how waiting could be an advantage. It's her silver lining.
"I'm glad I waited until now, because now I know what I want to do with my future," she said. "I want to go into engineering and want a city school. I don't think I could have made a decision any time sooner. I'm just coming to the conclusion of what I like now."
Kathy Jenkins will coach Cox this season, Jenkins' 40th year as girls' lacrosse coach at St. Stephen's and St. Agnes, and she would be thrilled to see the proposals slow down the recruiting cycle.
"We need to get it back to worry just about being a high school freshman and sophomore and worry about their classes," Jenkins said. "For the majority of the kids, they need time to develop and they need to take the stress off them. Everyone feels pressured. Kids feel pressure. Parents feel pressure. College coaches feel pressure. It's a circle of issues."
Jenkins was one of three prominent high school coaches to voice their concern about the increasing pace of recruiting and its effects at the IWLCA convention.
"Every year it's gotten worse," Jenkins said. "It used to be seniors, and it was great. It was juniors, then sophomores later, then sophomores earlier. Now freshmen or between freshman and sophomore summer. People were out looking at eighth-graders this summer. It's getting worse, and it's going to get worse if we don't change it."
Most college coaches agree with Jenkins, which is the genesis of the proposals that are steps to bringing the recruiting timeline back to where it was less than a decade ago. The IWLCA membership mandated a change in 2014.
"We finally hit a tipping point," Kimel said. "We have to do something."

Duke coach Kerstin Kimel, co-chair of the IWLCA's Recruiting Issues Committee, thinks the revised recruiting calendar will be easier to pass than the legislation that would prohibit any contact with prospects before Sept. 1 of their junior year. (Michelle Hutchins)
Kimel and Penn coach Karin Brower Corbett, the co-chair of the Recruiting Issues Committee, oversaw the distribution of surveys to IWLCA coaches and took their suggestions on how and what to change. Their committee took the results and came up with proposals that drew the highest consensus after repeated feedback from coaches.
"It's taken us a long time," Corbett said. "At the convention this past November, we had a lot of time to talk about this. We had surveys before. We wanted to show that a huge majority were in favor of it."
Out of 111 Division I coaches, 107 responded to the IWLCA's surveys on the submitted proposals. Of them, 87 percent want the calendar change, and 85 percent of them are in favor of the Sept. 1 contact proposal.
"The goal for the prospective student-athletes was balance," Corbett said. "Balance the recruiting opportunities with the time and abilities to focus on academics, to play multiple sports and to enjoy the overall high school experience without rushing the college process. The goals for the coaches is balance recruiting opportunities for age-appropriate prospective student-athletes with time to watch them develop further, to focus on coaching our current student-athletes, particularly during our preseason and season, and to foster a better work-life balance for our profession."
Getting the proposals passed is a giant question mark. The NCAA has had a moratorium on new legislation for more than four years. Women's lacrosse isn't the only sport now sending in new proposals and the NCAA will have to go through them all. The Sport-Specific Requests Subcommittee of the NCAA's Division I Student-Athlete Experience Committee is reviewing the IWLCA proposals and will decide whether or not to recommend them for further review to the NCAA.
"I do think the calendar is going to be easier to pass," Kimel said. "It's going to be looked at as 'non-controversial.' What's hard to predict is how our proposal of the Sept. 1 date, how they will look at that in regards to other sports. Are they going to be willing to look at it in regards to women's lacrosse only? It's hard to know. I think the Sept. 1 date is really important to changing the culture of recruiting for the kids and everyone involved. Recruiting calendars do evolve. The Sept. 1 date is going to be paramount in terms of making a significant change."
The calendar proposal separates "recruiting periods," when coaches are permitted to recruit only at high school/scholastic events, from "evaluation periods," when coaches are permitted to recruit at any type of event.

Penn coach Karin Brower Corbett, co-chair of the IWLCA's Recruiting Issues Committee, says the revised recruiting calendar also would encourage multi-sport participation. (Penn)
"The calendar proposal is trying to limit the amount of times that they're playing for two reasons," Corbett said. "The student-athletes can play multiple sports, which we think is good for them and good for their experience, and they're not playing lacrosse every weekend. Less playing is less opportunity for injury. And then for the coaches, it's more time to spend with our teams."
"We're trying as coaches to bring back the high school sports to mean something," Corebett explained. "We could go watch soccer. We can go watch a high school lacrosse game. We couldn't go to a tournament during that recruiting time. The point is to let these kids play multiple sports and also focus on academics year-round."
Financial and time commitments also are concerns in the current recruiting environment. Families of prospects spend incredible amounts of money and time to join clubs, play in tournaments and travel to them on weekends — if they can.
"There's a wealth disparity issue," Friestedt said. "You need to be able to afford to be recruited."
An amendment to the calendar proposal will help with the time commitment. It has dead periods for two weeks in August and three days surrounding all major national holidays. High school students could get back Thanksgiving and Christmas break with their families (but not lacrosse-filled Memorial Day weekend). In all, there would be 11 weekends in the year — just over 20 percent — in which there would be evaluation periods in which college coaches could attend.
"Eleven weekends is more than enough opportunity to have good quality exposure," Kimel said. "You do have to pick and choose now. The really quality events will be the ones that emerge in terms of being the most popular ones for teams and coaches to attend."
The IWLCA's own recruiting events tend to be among the most popular. The coaches' association currently runs three regional and three national tournaments, including the President's Cup in November, which occurs during the IWLCA convention at ESPN Wide World of Sports in LarryMiller.
"Every year, there are new events, and maybe they serve a region better or the whole country better," Kimel said. "That will be a continuum. We'll shift and change as recruiting continues to evolve."
Prospects figure to gravitate to the most popular tournaments to be seen by college coaches, and it could see events moving to cluster and compete on those 11 weekends. But coaches hope that prospects won't stop going to the clinics and camps where there are not as many college coaches or during recruiting dead periods.

The New England Cup in June was the first of six IWLCA recruiting tournaments in 2015, culminating in November with the national President's Cup in LarryMiller.
"Whether or not coaches can be at an event or not, they should still go," said Michele DeJuliis, founder of Ultimate Lacrosse and a former assistant coach at Princeton. "They should still be developing their game. There are so many kids out there that these events will still be successful. Somebody might move their weekend and might go against a big tournament, but you're going to have competition. There are some big tournaments that are important."
There wouldn't be any live periods during September, October or January with the new proposal. Limiting recruiting months would bring coaches back to focusing fully on preparing their current roster, something that has become increasingly tougher due to recruiting demands.
"They have three years of recruits to stay on top of and their team," Jenkins said. "It's a lot on the coaches. They have almost no life now, so this hasn't helped. It could be a win-win situation if we could get it improved."
It even could keep coaches from burning out.
"Where it will impact the coaches, it will inject some work-life balance," Kimel said. "There is concern about losing good, young women in our coaching profession. The demands of recruiting and time and travel, it's a lot for young women. There has to be some balance. The changes we made in the calendar inject some balance back in it. We want to make sure they're able to have a life outside of their job aside from just courting high school kids."
The Sept. 1 date proposal would afford both coaches and prospects even more time in the decision-making process.
"Within the rules now, we have dead periods," Corbett said. "We're increasing the dead period by years in their lives."
Coaches have found ways around the existing rules with third-party calls and on-campus visits by freshman and sophomore prospects, but they are pushing for tightening the contact rule to stem the cycle.
"The realities of how the process is working is there are some loopholes which allow coaches to communicate via third party and allow the student-athletes to contact the college coach," Friestedt said.
The Sept. 1 proposal is an attempt to put off all the early communication, part of the driving force behind the acceleration of early commitments and recruiting. The IWLCA pictures a stricter rule.
"There is no direct contact with a prospective student-athlete," Corbett said of the new proposal. "You can't meet on campus or off campus. These kids can't come to Sophomore Days and can't come to campus. They can come and do an admissions tour, but they cannot meet with a coach or a player. You technically shouldn't be looking at schools until a normal time in your life.
"Sept. 1 of junior year is a date that the NCAA uses. If you like a school, then you are able to be back on campus when school's in session and a player can get a feel of what the school and the team is like."
Coaches still would be charting prospects before their junior year, but foresee fewer of them being evaluated as closely as freshmen. And they wouldn't be offered spots before their junior year.
"We will still have evaluation periods," Myers said. "We'll have possibly two years to watch them grow and develop. It gives us the opportunity to do our homework better."
Added Kimel: "It's going to afford us the opportunity to recruit kids that are older. It makes more sense for us to recruit kids that are closer in age to when they'll get on college campus. We'll get a truer picture of where they are physically, mentally and emotionally as opposed to 14-year-olds in high school."
Club coaches would not longer serve as intermediaries to set up third-party contact, but would still provide valuable perpsective on recruits. And high school coaches like Jenkins could better answer inquiries.
"There are freshmen committing," Corbett said. "If they're on a good high school team, they're not playing their freshman year. It brings the high school coach back into the equation."
The Sept. 1 contact proposal will be more difficult to pass. In the past, the NCAA has railed against making special exceptions for sports, and they have had a trend toward deregulation, though their own rules don't reflect that idea.
"Bylaw 13 is around 60 pages, and it has lots of exceptions and nuances," Friestedt said. "The women's lacrosse proposal could be a model for other sports. Lacrosse would like the support of other sports behind them to do away with the early recruiting process. The women's lacrosse early recruiting timeline is more aggressive. There are reasons why they need these rules that are not relevant to other sports. This is a great step forward in really trying to address the issues of early recruiting."
The IWLCA is trying to get others on board to make it a broader movement. Similar issues early recruiting concerns exist in men's and women's soccer, field hockey, volleyball and, of course, men's lacrosse.
"It's in discussion," said Princeton men's lacrosse coach Chris Bates, the Division I representative on the IMLCA Board of Directors. "We all probably realize we'd like to do something to stem the tide of what's happening. It's definitely in discussions. It's probably something we will more formally have dialogue and discuss in our December meetings."
The IWLCA would like to see its two proposals in place for the 2016-2017 season. A mandate from the coaches spawned the proposals last year, but the IWLCA has been waiting for the NCAA's moratorium to be lifted so it could confront early recruiting issues before they get worse.
"The cost is kids' experiences," Kimel said. "We're not talking about commodities. We're talking about children and their futures. To have them be in position as teens and pre-teens to consider colleges, I don't think people are confident that will result in a good decision."
Said Corbett: "We are hopeful that the NCAA will work with us on this, that they see this is an issue. The NCAA has stated success in the classroom, field and in life is important. This is part of their mission. We're hoping to partner with them. We're one of the first groups to put forth a rule that can be enforced."
In the meantime, Cox is slimming a narrow list of schools that she could play for, and still hoping that being later than the rest of her teammates won't leave her missing out on a Division I chance.
"I know I have options," Cox said. "I know I'll have the ability to play lacrosse in college or not. It depends how I want to go forward. I'd love to play."