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Duke vs Johns Hopkins mens lacrosse 2014 NCAA quarter final Recruiting in College Lacrosse
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The Future Of Recruiting in College Lacrosse

After a number of interesting conversations with current and former college lacrosse coaches and players, I feel compelled to talk about the future of recruiting in college lacrosse. Don’t worry, I’m not going to be a negative nancy here. While I have been adamantly against early recruiting in the past, and still hold some of those opinions (we’ll get to that old hat later), I am also starting to see why the landscape is as it is, and why it is unlikely to change in terms of structure.

Will the recruiting landscape change for other reasons? You bet.

If you’re asking why people keep harping on early recruiting and recruiting in college lacrosse in general, it’s because things have changed a lot in the last 10-15 years, and big changes tend to generate a lot of noise.

Recruiting in College Lacrosse – The Old Way

In the late 90s, it was very rare for kids to commit before their junior spring or senior fall. It wasn’t impossible that a true blue chip player could commit a little earlier, but it wasn’t the norm by any means. And this was the timetable of recruiting before that for decades. Get seniors. If you go far enough back, recruiting actually took place on campus, and coaches would scour their university for potential lacrosse talent. The head coach at Virginia and former Brown player, Dom Starsia, is one of those guys!

unc_lacrosse_1986

Recruiting in College Lacrosse – Today’s Scene

Currently, recruiting in college lacrosse is really quite different, but the approaches are far from uniform. To call it diverse would be an understatement. D1 coaches approach things very differently from D3 coaches or MCLA coaches, and even within the divisions there are huge discrepancies between different programs when it comes to approach, timing, numbers of recruits, and more. Some guys fill their classes early on a consistent basis, while others wait. Some programs will talk to already committed players, and others won’t. Some players will honor commitments, and others will move on to a different school. It is convoluted, filled with pressure and expectations, and in my opinion, has spun slightly out of control.

loyola unc lacrosse poke check

So what’s wrong with the recruiting process right now?

Problems in Recruiting

In my opinion, we are too often asking very good, but very young, lacrosse players to make decisions about their life that they may not be ready to make. If you’re recruited in the fall of your freshman year, and you commit somewhere, do you really know that’s the school you want to attend in three or four years? Now, the chances are that if you commit to Harvard or Duke, or some other top notch academic school, you’ve made a great choice and will have plenty of opportunity. And it’s hard to argue against the choice to commit there. But what if you commit to a school for only one reason… a purely lacrosse reason?

At that only-a-lacrosse-decision point, I think we start to see some problems with early recruiting. When kids at a certain age start committing to great schools, other kids feel pressure to commit as well, but the decisions made are not always the best ones, simply because they are rushed. Does the above decision pan out as I have described always? Absolutely not. But I am not worried about every example, I am more interested in the overall culture.

For me, the biggest problem is kids feeling pressured into committing to a school before they truly know where they want to go, or what they might want to study. It’s not an end of the world problem, and kids can de-commit, transfer, or just make the best of it, but it nags at me still. Perhaps it is my bias that academics should really trump athletics, but that’s probably a post for another day.

Another interesting factor to consider for the early commit issue is that it impacts the entire recruiting structure further down the line. Kids who have committed can drop off, or lose focus, and kids who have not committed can suffer by playing inferior competition or getting less looks, especially if they are late bloomers. For me, the current early recruiting landscape creates a tiered system that doesn’t make a ton of sense, and I don’t think the vast majority of players, coaches, companies, or programs benefit from it all that much.

What’s Right About Recruiting

Other than the freshman committing issue, there is a lot of good in the recruiting world. There are a number of high level clubs, camps, and showcase events where players can be seen. D1 recruiters who hit the road hard see a LOT of kids every year. It’s nonstop. If you’re a diamond in the rough, there is a good chance someone will find you… but there is also a huge machine at work for certain regions and socioeconomic brackets, and that can obfuscate things a bit, as well as help. Being “found” though is easier now than ever.

maverik showtime all stars 2015

There are also plenty of high quality groups out there to help with the recruiting process. I was fortunate in high school to be coached by a former DII coach, and his word meant something. I had no film or anything like that. If I had a coach who didn’t know the game well, I might not have been recruited. But those days are long gone now. Companies like LacrosseRecruits.com offer a number of different services to help players get exposure. Groups like 3d focus on instruction just as much as, if not more than, recruiting, while also keeping a high level of talent in their programs. If you want to start a small and local program, and gain some notoriety (the good kind), you can and one need look no further than the NJ Riot for an example. It takes a ton of work, but it’s doable. There are also a ton of great coaches out there who genuinely want to teach the game.

The point is that there are a lot of passionate and dedicated people involved in lacrosse recruiting who want to make your experience better. Of course there are also some people just trying to make a quick buck. This creates a situation of competition, where everyone is vying for the best players, to play in the best events, and to have as many kids commit as possible. While competition can have its pitfalls, good things can come from it too, and one of those results has been the professionalization of the recruiting game.

Recruiting in college lacrosse is still based on connections to a large extent. Some high schools still send a lot of kids to certain schools, as do certain club programs, but overall, it has opened up a lot more since the 1990s. If a kid from California is good, he is good, and it’s no longer novel. In fact, people back east have probably been watching since he was a freshman or sophomore. Coupled with good instruction this can yield great results.

What Does The Future Hold?

I’ll be as honest as I can possible be: early recruiting is not going to stop, but it is going to change. The first thing we are likely to see is more college programs recruiting kids who have already committed to other schools. It’s not that common now, but this is a trend that I believe will grow. A player who commits as a freshman in high school will change in 2 years, and more of those kids are going to leave their old first program of choice for their new home. Other top level schools will see this and do the same in pursuing good committed players, simply because they feel they have to.

This will cause a ripple effect where some of the schools who recruited early will be forced to drop some of their early recruits. Sometimes this will be done using something the kid did online or in real life, but eventually, programs will drop kids simply because someone better came along. It happens now, but if recruiting already committed players picks up in pace, this will too.

NCAA Men's Lacrosse Division 1 Quaterfinals_ Ohio State vs Cornell

At that point, trust really starts to slip out the window and the timeline, in effect, pushes back closer to where is used to be. Instead of commits being big news, National Letters of Intent will become the truly big deal, signing day will mean something bigger, and recruiting in college lacrosse will be just a little bit more like football and basketball where you’re never quite sure that a player will attend the school in question until they sign on the dotted line… and even then things will be mutable.

I have always tended to make early recruiting out to be some sort of plague sweeping the land, and in retrospect that may have been just a tad severe. A more apt description is that early recruiting is a phase in the changing landscape that is recruiting in college lacrosse.

Which Colleges Benefit Moving Forward?

Moving forward we will still have young kids committing to schools for lacrosse reasons. Hidden gem type players will still get found, even if it’s late in the game, and most of them will find a good home for four years. The coaches who thrive on early commits now might lose some of their sway with those players, but since many of them are at top level academic schools, the draw will still be there. Lower ranked academic and/or lacrosse schools will still face an uphill battle… but the hill might get steeper.

If a school snags a great young kid now, and he pans out, and then they snag a couple more good guys, a lower-rated program can see some success, and start to climb the ladder that is college lacrosse. Right now that happens, and every couple of years we see a program pop into the Top 20 list pretty quickly. But if the top academic schools and programs of history can recruit kids away from these schools, AND drop their early recruits who don’t pan out the way they thought, power really starts to vest itself at the top again.

2014 Duke National Champions

We’ve seen some pretty unbelievable parity at all three NCAA levels with new programs winning titles at the D1, D2, and D3 levels in the past five years. Teams like UVA and Hopkins have missed the tourney. Cuse didn’t continue their legendary Final Four streak… this has all happened pretty recently. Some of it may be due to successful early recruiting, but much of it has been due to the growth of recruitable lacrosse talent and the lagging growth of college lacrosse relative to that.

My theory is that if the talent continues to grow and the commitment idea starts to mean less, we will see more accumulation of talent near the top. If you can get early kids, drop them for something better, and lure players away from other programs, what’s to stop the top dogs from staying up top? With the broad swath of talent out there, it’s the only way to guarantee a good roster. It’s more cutthroat, but it’s also more honest in a way.

Recruiting in college lacrosse is not broken, but it is filled with pressure right now. As more kids emerge later in the game, and early commits start to fade, the landscape will change again. Kids will still think about where they want to play and attend school, but the final decisions will likely happen later. I’m ok with that.